HALO: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model for Embodied Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but often struggle in long-horizon or out-of-distribution scenarios due to the lack of explicit mechanisms for multimodal reasoning and anticipating how the world will evolve under action. Recent works introduce textual chain-of-thought or visual subgoal prediction within VLA models to reason, but still fail to offer a unified human-like reasoning framework for joint textual reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction. To this end, we propose HALO, a unified VLA model that enables embodied multimodal chain-of-thought (EM-CoT) reasoning through a sequential process of textual task reasoning, visual subgoal prediction for fine-grained guidance, and EM-CoT-augmented action prediction. We instantiate HALO with a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture that decouples semantic reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction into specialized experts while allowing seamless cross-expert collaboration. To enable HALO learning at scale, we introduce an automated pipeline to synthesize EM-CoT training data along with a carefully crafted training recipe. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (1) HALO achieves superior performance in both simulated and real-world environments, surpassing baseline policy pi_0 by 34.1% on RoboTwin benchmark; (2) all proposed components of the training recipe and EM-CoT design help improve task success rate; and (3) HALO exhibits strong generalization capabilities under aggressive unseen environmental randomization with our proposed EM-CoT reasoning.

UrbanAlign: Post-hoc Semantic Calibration for VLM-Human Preference Alignment

Aligning vision-language model (VLM) outputs with human preferences in domain-specific tasks typically requires fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, both of which demand labelled data and GPU compute. We show that for subjective perception tasks, this alignment can be achieved without any model training: VLMs are already strong concept extractors but poor decision calibrators, and the gap can be closed externally. We propose a training-free post-hoc concept-bottleneck pipeline consisting of three tightly coupled stages: concept mining, multi-agent structured scoring, and geometric calibration, unified by an end-to-end dimension optimization loop. Interpretable evaluation dimensions are mined from a handful of human annotations; an Observer-Debater-Judge chain extracts robust continuous concept scores from a frozen VLM; and locally-weighted ridge regression on a hybrid visual-semantic manifold calibrates these scores against human ratings. Applied to urban perception as UrbanAlign, the framework achieves 72.2% accuracy ($κ=0.45$) on Place Pulse 2.0 across six categories, outperforming the best supervised baseline by +15.1 pp and uncalibrated VLM scoring by +16.3 pp, with full dimension-level interpretability and zero model-weight modification.

CTC-TTS: LLM-based dual-streaming text-to-speech with CTC alignment

Large-language-model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems can generate natural speech, but most are not designed for low-latency dual-streaming synthesis. High-quality dual-streaming TTS depends on accurate text--speech alignment and well-designed training sequences that balance synthesis quality and latency. Prior work often relies on GMM-HMM based forced-alignment toolkits (e.g., MFA), which are pipeline-heavy and less flexible than neural aligners; fixed-ratio interleaving of text and speech tokens struggles to capture text--speech alignment regularities. We propose CTC-TTS, which replaces MFA with a CTC based aligner and introduces a bi-word based interleaving strategy. Two variants are designed: CTC-TTS-L (token concatenation along the sequence length) for higher quality and CTC-TTS-F (embedding stacking along the feature dimension) for lower latency. Experiments show that CTC-TTS outperforms fixed-ratio interleaving and MFA-based baselines on streaming synthesis and zero-shot tasks. Speech samples are available at https://ctctts.github.io/.

ProphetKV: User-Query-Driven Selective Recomputation for Efficient KV Cache Reuse in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The prefill stage of long-context Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is severely bottlenecked by computational overhead. To mitigate this, recent methods assemble pre-calculated KV caches of retrieved RAG documents (by a user query) and reprocess selected tokens to recover cross-attention between these pre-calculated KV caches. However, we identify a fundamental "crowding-out effect" in current token selection criteria: globally salient but user-query-irrelevant tokens saturate the limited recomputation budget, displacing the tokens truly essential for answering the user query and degrading inference accuracy. We propose ProphetKV, a user-query-driven KV Cache reuse method for RAG scenarios. ProphetKV dynamically prioritizes tokens based on their semantic relevance to the user query and employs a dual-stage recomputation pipeline to fuse layer-wise attention metrics into a high-utility set. By ensuring the recomputation budget is dedicated to bridging the informational gap between retrieved context and the user query, ProphetKV achieves high-fidelity attention recovery with minimal overhead. Our extensive evaluation results show that ProphetKV retains 96%-101% of full-prefill accuracy with only a 20% recomputation ratio, while achieving accuracy improvements of 8.8%-24.9% on RULER and 18.6%-50.9% on LongBench over the state-of-the-art approaches (e.g., CacheBlend, EPIC, and KVShare).

MVGD-Net: A Novel Motion-aware Video Glass Surface Detection Network

Glass surface ubiquitous in both daily life and professional environments presents a potential threat to vision-based systems, such as robot and drone navigation. To solve this challenge, most recent studies have shown significant interest in Video Glass Surface Detection (VGSD). We observe that objects in the reflection (or transmission) layer appear farther from the glass surfaces. Consequently, in video motion scenarios, the notable reflected (or transmitted) objects on the glass surface move slower than objects in non-glass regions within the same spatial plane, and this motion inconsistency can effectively reveal the presence of glass surfaces. Based on this observation, we propose a novel network, named MVGD-Net, for detecting glass surfaces in videos by leveraging motion inconsistency cues. Our MVGD-Net features three novel modules: the Cross-scale Multimodal Fusion Module (CMFM) that integrates extracted spatial features and estimated optical flow maps, the History Guided Attention Module (HGAM) and Temporal Cross Attention Module (TCAM), both of which further enhances temporal features. A Temporal-Spatial Decoder (TSD) is also introduced to fuse the spatial and temporal features for generating the glass region mask. Furthermore, for learning our network, we also propose a large-scale dataset, which comprises 312 diverse glass scenarios with a total of 19,268 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MVGD-Net outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods.

OxygenREC: An Instruction-Following Generative Framework for E-commerce Recommendation

Traditional recommendation systems suffer from inconsistency in multi-stage optimization objectives. Generative Recommendation (GR) mitigates them through an end-to-end framework; however, existing methods still rely on matching mechanisms based on inductive patterns. Although responsive, they lack the ability to uncover complex user intents that require deductive reasoning based on world knowledge. Meanwhile, LLMs show strong deep reasoning capabilities, but their latency and computational costs remain challenging for industrial applications. More critically, there are performance bottlenecks in multi-scenario scalability: as shown in Figure 1, existing solutions require independent training and deployment for each scenario, leading to low resource utilization and high maintenance costs-a challenge unaddressed in GR literature. To address these, we present OxygenREC, an industrial recommendation system that leverages Fast-Slow Thinking to deliver deep reasoning with strict latency and multi-scenario requirements of real-world environments. First, we adopt a Fast-Slow Thinking architecture. Slow thinking uses a near-line LLM pipeline to synthesize Contextual Reasoning Instructions, while fast thinking employs a high-efficiency encoder-decoder backbone for real-time generation. Second, to ensure reasoning instructions effectively enhance recommendation generation, we introduce a semantic alignment mechanism with Instruction-Guided Retrieval (IGR) to filter intent-relevant historical behaviors and use a Query-to-Item (Q2I) loss for instruction-item consistency. Finally, to resolve multi-scenario scalability, we transform scenario information into controllable instructions, using unified reward mapping and Soft Adaptive Group Clip Policy Optimization (SA-GCPO) to align policies with diverse business objectives, realizing a train-once-deploy-everywhere paradigm.

Phoneme-based speech recognition driven by large language models and sampling marginalization

Recently, the Large Language Model-based Phoneme-to-Grapheme (LLM-P2G) method has shown excellent performance in speech recognition tasks and has become a feasible direction to replace the traditional WFST decoding method. This framework takes into account both recognition accuracy and system scalability through two-stage modeling of phoneme prediction and text generation. However, the existing LLM-P2G adopts the Top-K Marginalized (TKM) training strategy, and its candidate phoneme sequences rely on beam search generation, which has problems such as insufficient path diversity, low training efficiency, and high resource overhead. To this end, this paper proposes a sampling marginalized training strategy (Sampling-K Marginalized, SKM), which replaces beam search with random sampling to generate candidate paths, improving marginalized modeling and training efficiency. Experiments were conducted on Polish and German datasets, and the results showed that SKM further improved the model learning convergence speed and recognition performance while maintaining the complexity of the model. Comparative experiments with a speech recognition method that uses a projector combined with a large language model (SpeechLLM) also show that the SKM-driven LLM-P2G has more advantages in recognition accuracy and structural simplicity. The study verified the practical value and application potential of this method in cross-language speech recognition systems.

Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding: Methods, Trends, and Challenges

Multi-intent spoken language understanding (SLU) involves two tasks: multiple intent detection and slot filling, which jointly handle utterances containing more than one intent. Owing to this characteristic, which closely reflects real-world applications, the task has attracted increasing research attention, and substantial progress has been achieved. However, there remains a lack of a comprehensive and systematic review of existing studies on multi-intent SLU. To this end, this paper presents a survey of recent advances in multi-intent SLU. We provide an in-depth overview of previous research from two perspectives: decoding paradigms and modeling approaches. On this basis, we further compare the performance of representative models and analyze their strengths and limitations. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and outline promising directions for future research. We hope this survey will offer valuable insights and serve as a useful reference for advancing research in multi-intent SLU.

SGMAGNet: A Baseline Model for 3D Cloud Phase Structure Reconstruction on a New Passive Active Satellite Benchmark

Cloud phase profiles are critical for numerical weather prediction (NWP), as they directly affect radiative transfer and precipitation processes. In this study, we present a benchmark dataset and a baseline framework for transforming multimodal satellite observations into detailed 3D cloud phase structures, aiming toward operational cloud phase profile retrieval and future integration with NWP systems to improve cloud microphysics parameterization. The multimodal observations consist of (1) high--spatiotemporal--resolution, multi-band visible (VIS) and thermal infrared (TIR) imagery from geostationary satellites, and (2) accurate vertical cloud phase profiles from spaceborne lidar (CALIOP\slash CALIPSO) and radar (CPR\slash CloudSat). The dataset consists of synchronized image--profile pairs across diverse cloud regimes, defining a supervised learning task: given VIS/TIR patches, predict the corresponding 3D cloud phase structure. We adopt SGMAGNet as the main model and compare it with several baseline architectures, including UNet variants and SegNet, all designed to capture multi-scale spatial patterns. Model performance is evaluated using standard classification metrics, including Precision, Recall, F1-score, and IoU. The results demonstrate that SGMAGNet achieves superior performance in cloud phase reconstruction, particularly in complex multi-layer and boundary transition regions. Quantitatively, SGMAGNet attains a Precision of 0.922, Recall of 0.858, F1-score of 0.763, and an IoU of 0.617, significantly outperforming all baselines across these key metrics.

SHREC 2025: Protein surface shape retrieval including electrostatic potential

This SHREC 2025 track dedicated to protein surface shape retrieval involved 9 participating teams. We evaluated the performance in retrieval of 15 proposed methods on a large dataset of 11,555 protein surfaces with calculated electrostatic potential (a key molecular surface descriptor). The performance in retrieval of the proposed methods was evaluated through different metrics (Accuracy, Balanced accuracy, F1 score, Precision and Recall). The best retrieval performance was achieved by the proposed methods that used the electrostatic potential complementary to molecular surface shape. This observation was also valid for classes with limited data which highlights the importance of taking into account additional molecular surface descriptors.