Qute: Towards Quantum-Native Database

This paper envisions a quantum database (Qute) that treats quantum computation as a first-class execution option. Unlike prior simulation-based methods that either run quantum algorithms on classical machines or adapt existing databases for quantum simulation, Qute instead (i) compiles an extended form of SQL into gate-efficient quantum circuits, (ii) employs a hybrid optimizer to dynamically select between quantum and classical execution plans, (iii) introduces selective quantum indexing, and (iv) designs fidelity-preserving storage to mitigate current qubit constraints. We also present a three-stage evolution roadmap toward quantum-native database. Finally, by deploying Qute on a real quantum processor (origin_wukong), we show that it outperforms a classical baseline at scale, and we release an open-source prototype at https://github.com/weAIDB/Qute.

ST-Raptor: An Agentic System for Semi-Structured Table QA

Semi-structured table question answering (QA) is a challenging task that requires (1) precise extraction of cell contents and positions and (2) accurate recovery of key implicit logical structures, hierarchical relationships, and semantic associations encoded in table layouts. In practice, such tables are often interpreted manually by human experts, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. However, automating this process remains difficult. Existing Text-to-SQL methods typically require converting semi-structured tables into structured formats, inevitably leading to information loss, while approaches like Text-to-Code and multimodal LLM-based QA struggle with complex layouts and often yield inaccurate answers. To address these limitations, we present ST-Raptor, an agentic system for semi-structured table QA. ST-Raptor offers an interactive analysis environment that combines visual editing, tree-based structural modeling, and agent-driven query resolution to support accurate and user-friendly table understanding. Experimental results on both benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate that ST-Raptor outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and usability. The code is available at https://github.com/weAIDB/ST-Raptor, and a demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/9GDR-94Cau4.

Dispelling the Curse of Singularities in Neural Network Optimizations

This work investigates the optimization instability of deep neural networks from a less-explored yet insightful perspective: the emergence and amplification of singularities in the parametric space. Our analysis reveals that parametric singularities inevitably grow with gradient updates and further intensify alignment with representations, leading to increased singularities in the representation space. We show that the gradient Frobenius norms are bounded by the top singular values of the weight matrices, and as training progresses, the mutually reinforcing growth of weight and representation singularities, termed the curse of singularities, relaxes these bounds, escalating the risk of sharp loss explosions. To counter this, we propose Parametric Singularity Smoothing (PSS), a lightweight, flexible, and effective method for smoothing the singular spectra of weight matrices. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, architectures, and optimizers demonstrate that PSS mitigates instability, restores trainability even after failure, and improves both training efficiency and generalization.

LAMP: Look-Ahead Mixed-Precision Inference of Large Language Models

Mixed-precision computations are a hallmark of the current stage of AI, driving the progress in large language models towards efficient, locally deployable solutions. This article addresses the floating-point computation of compositionally-rich functions, concentrating on transformer inference. Based on the rounding error analysis of a composition $f(g(\mathrm{x}))$, we provide an adaptive strategy that selects a small subset of components of $g(\mathrm{x})$ to be computed more accurately while all other computations can be carried out with lower accuracy. We then explain how this strategy can be applied to different compositions within a transformer and illustrate its overall effect on transformer inference. We study the effectiveness of this algorithm numerically on GPT-2 models and demonstrate that already very low recomputation rates allow for improvements of up to two orders of magnitude in accuracy.

Guiding the Recommender: Information-Aware Auto-Bidding for Content Promotion

Modern content platforms offer paid promotion to mitigate cold start by allocating exposure via auctions. Our empirical analysis reveals a counterintuitive flaw in this paradigm: while promotion rescues low-to-medium quality content, it can harm high-quality content by forcing exposure to suboptimal audiences, polluting engagement signals and downgrading future recommendation. We recast content promotion as a dual-objective optimization that balances short-term value acquisition with long-term model improvement. To make this tractable at bid time in content promotion, we introduce a decomposable surrogate objective, gradient coverage, and establish its formal connection to Fisher Information and optimal experimental design. We design a two-stage auto-bidding algorithm based on Lagrange duality that dynamically paces budget through a shadow price and optimizes impression-level bids using per-impression marginal utilities. To address missing labels at bid time, we propose a confidence-gated gradient heuristic, paired with a zeroth-order variant for black-box models that reliably estimates learning signals in real time. We provide theoretical guarantees, proving monotone submodularity of the composite objective, sublinear regret in online auction, and budget feasibility. Extensive offline experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the framework: it outperforms baselines, achieves superior final AUC/LogLoss, adheres closely to budget targets, and remains effective when gradients are approximated zeroth-order. These results show that strategic, information-aware promotion can improve long-term model performance and organic outcomes beyond naive impression-maximization strategies.

LongCat-Flash-Thinking-2601 Technical Report

We introduce LongCat-Flash-Thinking-2601, a 560-billion-parameter open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) reasoning model with superior agentic reasoning capability. LongCat-Flash-Thinking-2601 achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on a wide range of agentic benchmarks, including agentic search, agentic tool use, and tool-integrated reasoning. Beyond benchmark performance, the model demonstrates strong generalization to complex tool interactions and robust behavior under noisy real-world environments. Its advanced capability stems from a unified training framework that combines domain-parallel expert training with subsequent fusion, together with an end-to-end co-design of data construction, environments, algorithms, and infrastructure spanning from pre-training to post-training. In particular, the model's strong generalization capability in complex tool-use are driven by our in-depth exploration of environment scaling and principled task construction. To optimize long-tailed, skewed generation and multi-turn agentic interactions, and to enable stable training across over 10,000 environments spanning more than 20 domains, we systematically extend our asynchronous reinforcement learning framework, DORA, for stable and efficient large-scale multi-environment training. Furthermore, recognizing that real-world tasks are inherently noisy, we conduct a systematic analysis and decomposition of real-world noise patterns, and design targeted training procedures to explicitly incorporate such imperfections into the training process, resulting in improved robustness for real-world applications. To further enhance performance on complex reasoning tasks, we introduce a Heavy Thinking mode that enables effective test-time scaling by jointly expanding reasoning depth and width through intensive parallel thinking.

Can LLMs Clean Up Your Mess? A Survey of Application-Ready Data Preparation with LLMs

Data preparation aims to denoise raw datasets, uncover cross-dataset relationships, and extract valuable insights from them, which is essential for a wide range of data-centric applications. Driven by (i) rising demands for application-ready data (e.g., for analytics, visualization, decision-making), (ii) increasingly powerful LLM techniques, and (iii) the emergence of infrastructures that facilitate flexible agent construction (e.g., using Databricks Unity Catalog), LLM-enhanced methods are rapidly becoming a transformative and potentially dominant paradigm for data preparation. By investigating hundreds of recent literature works, this paper presents a systematic review of this evolving landscape, focusing on the use of LLM techniques to prepare data for diverse downstream tasks. First, we characterize the fundamental paradigm shift, from rule-based, model-specific pipelines to prompt-driven, context-aware, and agentic preparation workflows. Next, we introduce a task-centric taxonomy that organizes the field into three major tasks: data cleaning (e.g., standardization, error processing, imputation), data integration (e.g., entity matching, schema matching), and data enrichment (e.g., data annotation, profiling). For each task, we survey representative techniques, and highlight their respective strengths (e.g., improved generalization, semantic understanding) and limitations (e.g., the prohibitive cost of scaling LLMs, persistent hallucinations even in advanced agents, the mismatch between advanced methods and weak evaluation). Moreover, we analyze commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics (the empirical part). Finally, we discuss open research challenges and outline a forward-looking roadmap that emphasizes scalable LLM-data systems, principled designs for reliable agentic workflows, and robust evaluation protocols.

VIAFormer: Voxel-Image Alignment Transformer for High-Fidelity Voxel Refinement

We propose VIAFormer, a Voxel-Image Alignment Transformer model designed for Multi-view Conditioned Voxel Refinement--the task of repairing incomplete noisy voxels using calibrated multi-view images as guidance. Its effectiveness stems from a synergistic design: an Image Index that provides explicit 3D spatial grounding for 2D image tokens, a Correctional Flow objective that learns a direct voxel-refinement trajectory, and a Hybrid Stream Transformer that enables robust cross-modal fusion. Experiments show that VIAFormer establishes a new state of the art in correcting both severe synthetic corruptions and realistic artifacts on the voxel shape obtained from powerful Vision Foundation Models. Beyond benchmarking, we demonstrate VIAFormer as a practical and reliable bridge in real-world 3D creation pipelines, paving the way for voxel-based methods to thrive in large-model, big-data wave.

TacUMI: A Multi-Modal Universal Manipulation Interface for Contact-Rich Tasks

Task decomposition is critical for understanding and learning complex long-horizon manipulation tasks. Especially for tasks involving rich physical interactions, relying solely on visual observations and robot proprioceptive information often fails to reveal the underlying event transitions. This raises the requirement for efficient collection of high-quality multi-modal data as well as robust segmentation method to decompose demonstrations into meaningful modules. Building on the idea of the handheld demonstration device Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), we introduce TacUMI, a multi-modal data collection system that integrates additionally ViTac sensors, force-torque sensor, and pose tracker into a compact, robot-compatible gripper design, which enables synchronized acquisition of all these modalities during human demonstrations. We then propose a multi-modal segmentation framework that leverages temporal models to detect semantically meaningful event boundaries in sequential manipulations. Evaluation on a challenging cable mounting task shows more than 90 percent segmentation accuracy and highlights a remarkable improvement with more modalities, which validates that TacUMI establishes a practical foundation for both scalable collection and segmentation of multi-modal demonstrations in contact-rich tasks.

UPETrack: Unidirectional Position Estimation for Tracking Occluded Deformable Linear Objects

Real-time state tracking of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) is critical for enabling robotic manipulation of DLOs in industrial assembly, medical procedures, and daily-life applications. However, the high-dimensional configuration space, nonlinear dynamics, and frequent partial occlusions present fundamental barriers to robust real-time DLO tracking. To address these limitations, this study introduces UPETrack, a geometry-driven framework based on Unidirectional Position Estimation (UPE), which facilitates tracking without the requirement for physical modeling, virtual simulation, or visual markers. The framework operates in two phases: (1) visible segment tracking is based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) fitted via the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, and (2) occlusion region prediction employing UPE algorithm we proposed. UPE leverages the geometric continuity inherent in DLO shapes and their temporal evolution patterns to derive a closed-form positional estimator through three principal mechanisms: (i) local linear combination displacement term, (ii) proximal linear constraint term, and (iii) historical curvature term. This analytical formulation allows efficient and stable estimation of occluded nodes through explicit linear combinations of geometric components, eliminating the need for additional iterative optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that UPETrack surpasses two state-of-the-art tracking algorithms, including TrackDLO and CDCPD2, in both positioning accuracy and computational efficiency.