VIGIL: Defending LLM Agents Against Tool Stream Injection via Verify-Before-Commit

LLM agents operating in open environments face escalating risks from indirect prompt injection, particularly within the tool stream where manipulated metadata and runtime feedback hijack execution flow. Existing defenses encounter a critical dilemma as advanced models prioritize injected rules due to strict alignment while static protection mechanisms sever the feedback loop required for adaptive reasoning. To reconcile this conflict, we propose \textbf{VIGIL}, a framework that shifts the paradigm from restrictive isolation to a verify-before-commit protocol. By facilitating speculative hypothesis generation and enforcing safety through intent-grounded verification, \textbf{VIGIL} preserves reasoning flexibility while ensuring robust control. We further introduce \textbf{SIREN}, a benchmark comprising 959 tool stream injection cases designed to simulate pervasive threats characterized by dynamic dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{VIGIL} outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic defenses by reducing the attack success rate by over 22\% while more than doubling the utility under attack compared to static baselines, thereby achieving an optimal balance between security and utility. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VIGIL-378B/.

PiXTime: A Model for Federated Time Series Forecasting with Heterogeneous Data Structures Across Nodes

Time series are highly valuable and rarely shareable across nodes, making federated learning a promising paradigm to leverage distributed temporal data. However, different sampling standards lead to diverse time granularities and variable sets across nodes, hindering classical federated learning. We propose PiXTime, a novel time series forecasting model designed for federated learning that enables effective prediction across nodes with multi-granularity and heterogeneous variable sets. PiXTime employs a personalized Patch Embedding to map node-specific granularity time series into token sequences of a unified dimension for processing by a subsequent shared model, and uses a global VE Table to align variable category semantics across nodes, thereby enhancing cross-node transferability. With a transformer-based shared model, PiXTime captures representations of auxiliary series with arbitrary numbers of variables and uses cross-attention to enhance the prediction of the target series. Experiments show PiXTime achieves state-of-the-art performance in federated settings and demonstrates superior performance on eight widely used real-world traditional benchmarks.

DynaDebate: Breaking Homogeneity in Multi-Agent Debate with Dynamic Path Generation

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), which excel at collaborative decision-making and complex problem-solving. Recently, researchers have further investigated Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) frameworks, which enhance the reasoning and collaboration capabilities of MAS through information exchange and debate among multiple agents. However, existing approaches often rely on unguided initialization, causing agents to adopt identical reasoning paths that lead to the same errors. As a result, effective debate among agents is hindered, and the final outcome frequently degenerates into simple majority voting. To solve the above problem, in this paper, we introduce Dynamic Multi-Agent Debate (DynaDebate), which enhances the effectiveness of multi-agent debate through three key mechanisms: (1) Dynamic Path Generation and Allocation, which employs a dedicated Path Generation Agent to generate diverse and logical solution paths with adaptive redundancy; (2) Process-Centric Debate, which shifts the focus from surface-level outcome voting to rigorous step-by-step logic critique to ensure process correctness; (3) A Trigger-Based Verification Agent, which is activated upon disagreement and uses external tools to objectively resolve deadlocks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DynaDebate achieves superior performance across various benchmarks, surpassing existing state-of-the-art MAD methods.

Mind2Report: A Cognitive Deep Research Agent for Expert-Level Commercial Report Synthesis

Synthesizing informative commercial reports from massive and noisy web sources is critical for high-stakes business decisions. Although current deep research agents achieve notable progress, their reports still remain limited in terms of quality, reliability, and coverage. In this work, we propose Mind2Report, a cognitive deep research agent that emulates the commercial analyst to synthesize expert-level reports. Specifically, it first probes fine-grained intent, then searches web sources and records distilled information on the fly, and subsequently iteratively synthesizes the report. We design Mind2Report as a training-free agentic workflow that augments general large language models (LLMs) with dynamic memory to support these long-form cognitive processes. To rigorously evaluate Mind2Report, we further construct QRC-Eval comprising 200 real-world commercial tasks and establish a holistic evaluation strategy to assess report quality, reliability, and coverage. Experiments demonstrate that Mind2Report outperforms leading baselines, including OpenAI and Gemini deep research agents. Although this is a preliminary study, we expect it to serve as a foundation for advancing the future design of commercial deep research agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Melmaphother/Mind2Report.

From Feature Interaction to Feature Generation: A Generative Paradigm of CTR Prediction Models

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, a core task in recommendation systems, aims to estimate the probability of users clicking on items. Existing models predominantly follow a discriminative paradigm, which relies heavily on explicit interactions between raw ID embeddings. However, this paradigm inherently renders them susceptible to two critical issues: embedding dimensional collapse and information redundancy, stemming from the over-reliance on feature interactions \emph{over raw ID embeddings}. To address these limitations, we propose a novel \emph{Supervised Feature Generation (SFG)} framework, \emph{shifting the paradigm from discriminative ``feature interaction" to generative ``feature generation"}. Specifically, SFG comprises two key components: an \emph{Encoder} that constructs hidden embeddings for each feature, and a \emph{Decoder} tasked with regenerating the feature embeddings of all features from these hidden representations. Unlike existing generative approaches that adopt self-supervised losses, we introduce a supervised loss to utilize the supervised signal, \ie, click or not, in the CTR prediction task. This framework exhibits strong generalizability: it can be seamlessly integrated with most existing CTR models, reformulating them under the generative paradigm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFG consistently mitigates embedding collapse and reduces information redundancy, while yielding substantial performance gains across various datasets and base models. The code is available at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/GE4Rec.

Agent-R1: Training Powerful LLM Agents with End-to-End Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored for building Agents capable of active environmental interaction (e.g., via tool use) to solve complex problems. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is considered a key technology with significant potential for training such Agents; however, the effective application of RL to LLM Agents is still in its nascent stages and faces considerable challenges. Currently, this emerging field lacks in-depth exploration into RL approaches specifically tailored for the LLM Agent context, alongside a scarcity of flexible and easily extensible training frameworks designed for this purpose. To help advance this area, this paper first revisits and clarifies Reinforcement Learning methodologies for LLM Agents by systematically extending the Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework to comprehensively define the key components of an LLM Agent. Secondly, we introduce Agent-R1, a modular, flexible, and user-friendly training framework for RL-based LLM Agents, designed for straightforward adaptation across diverse task scenarios and interactive environments. We conducted experiments on Multihop QA benchmark tasks, providing initial validation for the effectiveness of our proposed methods and framework.

LIHE: Linguistic Instance-Split Hyperbolic-Euclidean Framework for Generalized Weakly-Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension

Existing Weakly-Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension (WREC) methods, while effective, are fundamentally limited by a one-to-one mapping assumption, hindering their ability to handle expressions corresponding to zero or multiple targets in realistic scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Weakly-Supervised Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension task (WGREC), a more practical paradigm that handles expressions with variable numbers of referents. However, extending WREC to WGREC presents two fundamental challenges: supervisory signal ambiguity, where weak image-level supervision is insufficient for training a model to infer the correct number and identity of referents, and semantic representation collapse, where standard Euclidean similarity forces hierarchically-related concepts into non-discriminative clusters, blurring categorical boundaries. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel WGREC framework named Linguistic Instance-Split Hyperbolic-Euclidean (LIHE), which operates in two stages. The first stage, Referential Decoupling, predicts the number of target objects and decomposes the complex expression into simpler sub-expressions. The second stage, Referent Grounding, then localizes these sub-expressions using HEMix, our innovative hybrid similarity module that synergistically combines the precise alignment capabilities of Euclidean proximity with the hierarchical modeling strengths of hyperbolic geometry. This hybrid approach effectively prevents semantic collapse while preserving fine-grained distinctions between related concepts. Extensive experiments demonstrate LIHE establishes the first effective weakly supervised WGREC baseline on gRefCOCO and Ref-ZOM, while HEMix achieves consistent improvements on standard REC benchmarks, improving IoU@0.5 by up to 2.5\%. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LIHE.

Look As You Think: Unifying Reasoning and Visual Evidence Attribution for Verifiable Document RAG via Reinforcement Learning

Aiming to identify precise evidence sources from visual documents, visual evidence attribution for visual document retrieval-augmented generation (VD-RAG) ensures reliable and verifiable predictions from vision-language models (VLMs) in multimodal question answering. Most existing methods adopt end-to-end training to facilitate intuitive answer verification. However, they lack fine-grained supervision and progressive traceability throughout the reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce the Chain-of-Evidence (CoE) paradigm for VD-RAG. CoE unifies Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and visual evidence attribution by grounding reference elements in reasoning steps to specific regions with bounding boxes and page indexes. To enable VLMs to generate such evidence-grounded reasoning, we propose Look As You Think (LAT), a reinforcement learning framework that trains models to produce verifiable reasoning paths with consistent attribution. During training, LAT evaluates the attribution consistency of each evidence region and provides rewards only when the CoE trajectory yields correct answers, encouraging process-level self-verification. Experiments on vanilla Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct with Paper- and Wiki-VISA benchmarks show that LAT consistently improves the vanilla model in both single- and multi-image settings, yielding average gains of 8.23% in soft exact match (EM) and 47.0% in IoU@0.5. Meanwhile, LAT not only outperforms the supervised fine-tuning baseline, which is trained to directly produce answers with attribution, but also exhibits stronger generalization across domains.

TeaRAG: A Token-Efficient Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) utilizes external knowledge to augment Large Language Models' (LLMs) reliability. For flexibility, agentic RAG employs autonomous, multi-round retrieval and reasoning to resolve queries. Although recent agentic RAG has improved via reinforcement learning, they often incur substantial token overhead from search and reasoning processes. This trade-off prioritizes accuracy over efficiency. To address this issue, this work proposes TeaRAG, a token-efficient agentic RAG framework capable of compressing both retrieval content and reasoning steps. 1) First, the retrieved content is compressed by augmenting chunk-based semantic retrieval with a graph retrieval using concise triplets. A knowledge association graph is then built from semantic similarity and co-occurrence. Finally, Personalized PageRank is leveraged to highlight key knowledge within this graph, reducing the number of tokens per retrieval. 2) Besides, to reduce reasoning steps, Iterative Process-aware Direct Preference Optimization (IP-DPO) is proposed. Specifically, our reward function evaluates the knowledge sufficiency by a knowledge matching mechanism, while penalizing excessive reasoning steps. This design can produce high-quality preference-pair datasets, supporting iterative DPO to improve reasoning conciseness. Across six datasets, TeaRAG improves the average Exact Match by 4% and 2% while reducing output tokens by 61% and 59% on Llama3-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/TeaRAG.

A Survey on Deep Text Hashing: Efficient Semantic Text Retrieval with Binary Representation

With the rapid growth of textual content on the Internet, efficient large-scale semantic text retrieval has garnered increasing attention from both academia and industry. Text hashing, which projects original texts into compact binary hash codes, is a crucial method for this task. By using binary codes, the semantic similarity computation for text pairs is significantly accelerated via fast Hamming distance calculations, and storage costs are greatly reduced. With the advancement of deep learning, deep text hashing has demonstrated significant advantages over traditional, data-independent hashing techniques. By leveraging deep neural networks, these methods can learn compact and semantically rich binary representations directly from data, overcoming the performance limitations of earlier approaches. This survey investigates current deep text hashing methods by categorizing them based on their core components: semantic extraction, hash code quality preservation, and other key technologies. We then present a detailed evaluation schema with results on several popular datasets, followed by a discussion of practical applications and open-source tools for implementation. Finally, we conclude by discussing key challenges and future research directions, including the integration of deep text hashing with large language models to further advance the field. The project for this survey can be accessed at https://github.com/hly1998/DeepTextHashing.