QSIM: Mitigating Overestimation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Action Similarity Weighted Q-Learning

Value decomposition (VD) methods have achieved remarkable success in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, their reliance on the max operator for temporal-difference (TD) target calculation leads to systematic Q-value overestimation. This issue is particularly severe in MARL due to the combinatorial explosion of the joint action space, which often results in unstable learning and suboptimal policies. To address this problem, we propose QSIM, a similarity weighted Q-learning framework that reconstructs the TD target using action similarity. Instead of using the greedy joint action directly, QSIM forms a similarity weighted expectation over a structured near-greedy joint action space. This formulation allows the target to integrate Q-values from diverse yet behaviorally related actions while assigning greater influence to those that are more similar to the greedy choice. By smoothing the target with structurally relevant alternatives, QSIM effectively mitigates overestimation and improves learning stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QSIM can be seamlessly integrated with various VD methods, consistently yielding superior performance and stability compared to the original algorithms. Furthermore, empirical analysis confirms that QSIM significantly mitigates the systematic value overestimation in MARL. Code is available at https://github.com/MaoMaoLYJ/pymarl-qsim.

Overview of the CXR-LT 2026 Challenge: Multi-Center Long-Tailed and Zero Shot Chest X-ray Classification

Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation is hindered by the long-tailed distribution of pathologies and the open-world nature of clinical environments. Existing benchmarks often rely on closed-set classes from single institutions, failing to capture the prevalence of rare diseases or the appearance of novel findings. To address this, we present the CXR-LT 2026 challenge. This third iteration of the benchmark introduces a multi-center dataset comprising over 145,000 images from PadChest and NIH Chest X-ray datasets. The challenge defines two core tasks: (1) Robust Multi-Label Classification on 30 known classes and (2) Open-World Generalization to 6 unseen (out-of-distribution) rare disease classes. We report the results of the top-performing teams, evaluating them via mean Average Precision (mAP), AUROC, and F1-score. The winning solutions achieved an mAP of 0.5854 on Task 1 and 0.4315 on Task 2, demonstrating that large-scale vision-language pre-training significantly mitigates the performance drop typically associated with zero-shot diagnosis.

Test-Time Computing for Referring Multimodal Large Language Models

We propose ControlMLLM++, a novel test-time adaptation framework that injects learnable visual prompts into frozen multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable fine-grained region-based visual reasoning without any model retraining or fine-tuning. Leveraging the insight that cross-modal attention maps intrinsically encode semantic correspondences between textual tokens and visual regions, ControlMLLM++ optimizes a latent visual token modifier during inference via a task-specific energy function to steer model attention towards user-specified areas. To enhance optimization stability and mitigate language prompt biases, ControlMLLM++ incorporates an improved optimization strategy (Optim++) and a prompt debiasing mechanism (PromptDebias). Supporting diverse visual prompt types including bounding boxes, masks, scribbles, and points, our method demonstrates strong out-of-domain generalization and interpretability. The code is available at https://github.com/mrwu-mac/ControlMLLM.

Enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) for Telecom using Dynamic Knowledge Graphs and Explainable Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential across a variety of tasks, but their application in the telecom field remains challenging due to domain complexity, evolving standards, and specialized terminology. Therefore, general-domain LLMs may struggle to provide accurate and reliable outputs in this context, leading to increased hallucinations and reduced utility in telecom operations.To address these limitations, this work introduces KG-RAG-a novel framework that integrates knowledge graphs (KGs) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance LLMs for telecom-specific tasks. In particular, the KG provides a structured representation of domain knowledge derived from telecom standards and technical documents, while RAG enables dynamic retrieval of relevant facts to ground the model's outputs. Such a combination improves factual accuracy, reduces hallucination, and ensures compliance with telecom specifications.Experimental results across benchmark datasets demonstrate that KG-RAG outperforms both LLM-only and standard RAG baselines, e.g., KG-RAG achieves an average accuracy improvement of 14.3% over RAG and 21.6% over LLM-only models. These results highlight KG-RAG's effectiveness in producing accurate, reliable, and explainable outputs in complex telecom scenarios.

SCENE OTA-FD: Self-Centering Noncoherent Estimator for Over-the-Air Federated Distillation

We propose SCENE (Self-Centering Noncoherent Estimator), a pilot-free and phase-invariant aggregation primitive for over-the-air federated distillation (OTA-FD). Each device maps its soft-label (class-probability) vector to nonnegative transmit energies under constant per-round power and constant-envelope signaling (PAPR near 1). At the server, a self-centering energy estimator removes the noise-energy offset and yields an unbiased estimate of the weighted soft-label average, with variance decaying on the order of 1/(SM) in the number of receive antennas M and repetition factor S. We also develop a pilot-free ratio-normalized variant that cancels unknown large-scale gains, provide a convergence bound consistent with coherent OTA-FD analyses, and present an overhead-based crossover comparison. SCENE targets short-coherence and hardware-constrained regimes, where avoiding per-round CSI is essential: it trades a modest noncoherent variance constant for zero uplink pilots, unbiased aggregation, and hardware-friendly transmission, and can outperform coherent designs when pilot overhead is non-negligible.

A Deployment-Friendly Foundational Framework for Efficient Computational Pathology

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have enabled robust generalization in computational pathology through large-scale datasets and expansive architectures, but their substantial computational cost, particularly for gigapixel whole slide images, limits clinical accessibility and scalability. Here, we present LitePath, a deployment-friendly foundational framework designed to mitigate model over-parameterization and patch level redundancy. LitePath integrates LiteFM, a compact model distilled from three large PFMs (Virchow2, H-Optimus-1 and UNI2) using 190 million patches, and the Adaptive Patch Selector (APS), a lightweight component for task-specific patch selection. The framework reduces model parameters by 28x and lowers FLOPs by 403.5x relative to Virchow2, enabling deployment on low-power edge hardware such as the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super. On this device, LitePath processes 208 slides per hour, 104.5x faster than Virchow2, and consumes 0.36 kWh per 3,000 slides, 171x lower than Virchow2 on an RTX3090 GPU. We validated accuracy using 37 cohorts across four organs and 26 tasks (26 internal, 9 external, and 2 prospective), comprising 15,672 slides from 9,808 patients disjoint from the pretraining data. LitePath ranks second among 19 evaluated models and outperforms larger models including H-Optimus-1, mSTAR, UNI2 and GPFM, while retaining 99.71% of the AUC of Virchow2 on average. To quantify the balance between accuracy and efficiency, we propose the Deployability Score (D-Score), defined as the weighted geometric mean of normalized AUC and normalized FLOP, where LitePath achieves the highest value, surpassing Virchow2 by 10.64%. These results demonstrate that LitePath enables rapid, cost-effective and energy-efficient pathology image analysis on accessible hardware while maintaining accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art PFMs and reducing the carbon footprint of AI deployment.

BitDance: Scaling Autoregressive Generative Models with Binary Tokens

We present BitDance, a scalable autoregressive (AR) image generator that predicts binary visual tokens instead of codebook indices. With high-entropy binary latents, BitDance lets each token represent up to $2^{256}$ states, yielding a compact yet highly expressive discrete representation. Sampling from such a huge token space is difficult with standard classification. To resolve this, BitDance uses a binary diffusion head: instead of predicting an index with softmax, it employs continuous-space diffusion to generate the binary tokens. Furthermore, we propose next-patch diffusion, a new decoding method that predicts multiple tokens in parallel with high accuracy, greatly speeding up inference. On ImageNet 256x256, BitDance achieves an FID of 1.24, the best among AR models. With next-patch diffusion, BitDance beats state-of-the-art parallel AR models that use 1.4B parameters, while using 5.4x fewer parameters (260M) and achieving 8.7x speedup. For text-to-image generation, BitDance trains on large-scale multimodal tokens and generates high-resolution, photorealistic images efficiently, showing strong performance and favorable scaling. When generating 1024x1024 images, BitDance achieves a speedup of over 30x compared to prior AR models. We release code and models to facilitate further research on AR foundation models. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/BitDance.

UniWeTok: An Unified Binary Tokenizer with Codebook Size $\mathit{2^{128}}$ for Unified Multimodal Large Language Model

Unified Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) require a visual representation that simultaneously supports high-fidelity reconstruction, complex semantic extraction, and generative suitability. However, existing visual tokenizers typically struggle to satisfy these conflicting objectives within a single framework. In this paper, we introduce UniWeTok, a unified discrete tokenizer designed to bridge this gap using a massive binary codebook ($\mathit{2^{128}}$). For training framework, we introduce Pre-Post Distillation and a Generative-Aware Prior to enhance the semantic extraction and generative prior of the discrete tokens. In terms of model architecture, we propose a convolution-attention hybrid architecture with the SigLu activation function. SigLu activation not only bounds the encoder output and stabilizes the semantic distillation process but also effectively addresses the optimization conflict between token entropy loss and commitment loss. We further propose a three-stage training framework designed to enhance UniWeTok's adaptability cross various image resolutions and perception-sensitive scenarios, such as those involving human faces and textual content. On ImageNet, UniWeTok achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance (FID: UniWeTok 1.38 vs. REPA 1.42) while requiring a remarkably low training compute (Training Tokens: UniWeTok 33B vs. REPA 262B). On general-domain, UniWeTok demonstrates highly competitive capabilities across a broad range of tasks, including multimodal understanding, image generation (DPG Score: UniWeTok 86.63 vs. FLUX.1 [Dev] 83.84), and editing (GEdit Overall Score: UniWeTok 5.09 vs. OmniGen 5.06). We release code and models to facilitate community exploration of unified tokenizer and MLLM.

Know More, Know Clearer: A Meta-Cognitive Framework for Knowledge Augmentation in Large Language Models

Knowledge augmentation has significantly enhanced the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing methods typically operate on the simplistic premise that model performance equates with internal knowledge, overlooking the knowledge-confidence gaps that lead to overconfident errors or uncertain truths. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel meta-cognitive framework for reliable knowledge augmentation via differentiated intervention and alignment. Our approach leverages internal cognitive signals to partition the knowledge space into mastered, confused, and missing regions, guiding targeted knowledge expansion. Furthermore, we introduce a cognitive consistency mechanism to synchronize subjective certainty with objective accuracy, ensuring calibrated knowledge boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate the our framework consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating its rationality in not only enhancing knowledge capabilities but also fostering cognitive behaviors that better distinguish knowns from unknowns.

3DGSNav: Enhancing Vision-Language Model Reasoning for Object Navigation via Active 3D Gaussian Splatting

Object navigation is a core capability of embodied intelligence, enabling an agent to locate target objects in unknown environments. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have facilitated zero-shot object navigation (ZSON). However, existing methods often rely on scene abstractions that convert environments into semantic maps or textual representations, causing high-level decision making to be constrained by the accuracy of low-level perception. In this work, we present 3DGSNav, a novel ZSON framework that embeds 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as persistent memory for VLMs to enhance spatial reasoning. Through active perception, 3DGSNav incrementally constructs a 3DGS representation of the environment, enabling trajectory-guided free-viewpoint rendering of frontier-aware first-person views. Moreover, we design structured visual prompts and integrate them with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to further improve VLM reasoning. During navigation, a real-time object detector filters potential targets, while VLM-driven active viewpoint switching performs target re-verification, ensuring efficient and reliable recognition. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks and real-world experiments on a quadruped robot demonstrate that our method achieves robust and competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches.The Project Page:https://aczheng-cai.github.io/3dgsnav.github.io/