Aggregation Queries over Unstructured Text: Benchmark and Agentic Method

Aggregation query over free text is a long-standing yet underexplored problem. Unlike ordinary question answering, aggregate queries require exhaustive evidence collection and systems are required to "find all," not merely "find one." Existing paradigms such as Text-to-SQL and Retrieval-Augmented Generation fail to achieve this completeness. In this work, we formalize entity-level aggregation querying over text in a corpus-bounded setting with strict completeness requirement. To enable principled evaluation, we introduce AGGBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate completeness-oriented aggregation under realistic large-scale corpus. To accompany the benchmark, we propose DFA (Disambiguation--Filtering--Aggregation), a modular agentic baseline that decomposes aggregation querying into interpretable stages and exposes key failure modes related to ambiguity, filtering, and aggregation. Empirical results show that DFA consistently improves aggregation evidence coverage over strong RAG and agentic baselines. The data and code are available in \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DFA-A4C1}.

Probing RLVR training instability through the lens of objective-level hacking

Prolonged reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been shown to drive continuous improvements in the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but the training is often prone to instabilities, especially in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. Training instability severely undermines model capability improvement, yet its underlying causes and mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a principled framework for understanding RLVR instability through the lens of objective-level hacking. Unlike reward hacking, which arises from exploitable verifiers, objective-level hacking emerges from token-level credit misalignment and is manifested as system-level spurious signals in the optimization objective. Grounded in our framework, together with extensive experiments on a 30B MoE model, we trace the origin and formalize the mechanism behind a key pathological training dynamic in MoE models: the abnormal growth of the training-inference discrepancy, a phenomenon widely associated with instability but previously lacking a mechanistic explanation. These findings provide a concrete and causal account of the training dynamics underlying instabilities in MoE models, offering guidance for the design of stable RLVR algorithms.

Machine learning based radiative parameterization scheme and its performance in operational reforecast experiments

Radiation is typically the most time-consuming physical process in numerical models. One solution is to use machine learning methods to simulate the radiation process to improve computational efficiency. From an operational standpoint, this study investigates critical limitations inherent to hybrid forecasting frameworks that embed deep neural networks into numerical prediction models, with a specific focus on two fundamental bottlenecks: coupling compatibility and long-term integration stability. A residual convolutional neural network is employed to approximate the Rapid Radiative Transfer Model for General Circulation Models (RRTMG) within the global operational system of China Meteorological Administration. We adopted an offline training and online coupling approach. First, a comprehensive dataset is generated through model simulations, encompassing all atmospheric columns both with and without cloud cover. To ensure the stability of the hybrid model, the dataset is enhanced via experience replay, and additional output constraints based on physical significance are imposed. Meanwhile, a LibTorch-based coupling method is utilized, which is more suitable for real-time operational computations. The hybrid model is capable of performing ten-day integrated forecasts as required. A two-month operational reforecast experiment demonstrates that the machine learning emulator achieves accuracy comparable to that of the traditional physical scheme, while accelerating the computation speed by approximately eightfold.

HoneyTrap: Deceiving Large Language Model Attackers to Honeypot Traps with Resilient Multi-Agent Defense

Jailbreak attacks pose significant threats to large language models (LLMs), enabling attackers to bypass safeguards. However, existing reactive defense approaches struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving multi-turn jailbreaks, where attackers continuously deepen their attacks to exploit vulnerabilities. To address this critical challenge, we propose HoneyTrap, a novel deceptive LLM defense framework leveraging collaborative defenders to counter jailbreak attacks. It integrates four defensive agents, Threat Interceptor, Misdirection Controller, Forensic Tracker, and System Harmonizer, each performing a specialized security role and collaborating to complete a deceptive defense. To ensure a comprehensive evaluation, we introduce MTJ-Pro, a challenging multi-turn progressive jailbreak dataset that combines seven advanced jailbreak strategies designed to gradually deepen attack strategies across multi-turn attacks. Besides, we present two novel metrics: Mislead Success Rate (MSR) and Attack Resource Consumption (ARC), which provide more nuanced assessments of deceptive defense beyond conventional measures. Experimental results on GPT-4, GPT-3.5-turbo, Gemini-1.5-pro, and LLaMa-3.1 demonstrate that HoneyTrap achieves an average reduction of 68.77% in attack success rates compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, even in a dedicated adaptive attacker setting with intensified conditions, HoneyTrap remains resilient, leveraging deceptive engagement to prolong interactions, significantly increasing the time and computational costs required for successful exploitation. Unlike simple rejection, HoneyTrap strategically wastes attacker resources without impacting benign queries, improving MSR and ARC by 118.11% and 149.16%, respectively.

No Cache Left Idle: Accelerating diffusion model via Extreme-slimming Caching

Diffusion models achieve remarkable generative quality, but computational overhead scales with step count, model depth, and sequence length. Feature caching is effective since adjacent timesteps yield highly similar features. However, an inherent trade-off remains: aggressive timestep reuse offers large speedups but can easily cross the critical line, hurting fidelity, while block- or token-level reuse is safer but yields limited computational savings. We present X-Slim (eXtreme-Slimming Caching), a training-free, cache-based accelerator that, to our knowledge, is the first unified framework to exploit cacheable redundancy across timesteps, structure (blocks), and space (tokens). Rather than simply mixing levels, X-Slim introduces a dual-threshold controller that turns caching into a push-then-polish process: it first pushes reuse at the timestep level up to an early-warning line, then switches to lightweight block- and token-level refresh to polish the remaining redundancy, and triggers full inference once the critical line is crossed to reset accumulated error. At each level, context-aware indicators decide when and where to cache. Across diverse tasks, X-Slim advances the speed-quality frontier. On FLUX.1-dev and HunyuanVideo, it reduces latency by up to 4.97x and 3.52x with minimal perceptual loss. On DiT-XL/2, it reaches 3.13x acceleration and improves FID by 2.42 over prior methods.

Efficient Level-Crossing Probability Calculation for Gaussian Process Modeled Data

Almost all scientific data have uncertainties originating from different sources. Gaussian process regression (GPR) models are a natural way to model data with Gaussian-distributed uncertainties. GPR also has the benefit of reducing I/O bandwidth and storage requirements for large scientific simulations. However, the reconstruction from the GPR models suffers from high computation complexity. To make the situation worse, classic approaches for visualizing the data uncertainties, like probabilistic marching cubes, are also computationally very expensive, especially for data of high resolutions. In this paper, we accelerate the level-crossing probability calculation efficiency on GPR models by subdividing the data spatially into a hierarchical data structure and only reconstructing values adaptively in the regions that have a non-zero probability. For each region, leveraging the known GPR kernel and the saved data observations, we propose a novel approach to efficiently calculate an upper bound for the level-crossing probability inside the region and use this upper bound to make the subdivision and reconstruction decisions. We demonstrate that our value occurrence probability estimation is accurate with a low computation cost by experiments that calculate the level-crossing probability fields on different datasets.

Time-Layer Adaptive Alignment for Speaker Similarity in Flow-Matching Based Zero-Shot TTS

Flow-Matching (FM)-based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) systems exhibit high-quality speech synthesis and robust generalization capabilities. However, the speaker representation ability of such systems remains underexplored, primarily due to the lack of explicit speaker-specific supervision in the FM framework. To this end, we conduct an empirical analysis of speaker information distribution and reveal its non-uniform allocation across time steps and network layers, underscoring the need for adaptive speaker alignment. Accordingly, we propose Time-Layer Adaptive Speaker Alignment (TLA-SA), a loss that enhances speaker consistency by jointly leveraging temporal and hierarchical variations in speaker information. Experimental results show that TLA-SA significantly improves speaker similarity compared to baseline systems on both research- and industrial-scale datasets and generalizes effectively across diverse model architectures, including decoder-only language models (LM) and FM-based TTS systems free of LM.

Gradient-based multi-focus image fusion with focus-aware saliency enhancement

Multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) aims to yield an all-focused image from multiple partially focused inputs, which is crucial in applications cover sur-veillance, microscopy, and computational photography. However, existing methods struggle to preserve sharp focus-defocus boundaries, often resulting in blurred transitions and focused details loss. To solve this problem, we propose a MFIF method based on significant boundary enhancement, which generates high-quality fused boundaries while effectively detecting focus in-formation. Particularly, we propose a gradient-domain-based model that can obtain initial fusion results with complete boundaries and effectively pre-serve the boundary details. Additionally, we introduce Tenengrad gradient detection to extract salient features from both the source images and the ini-tial fused image, generating the corresponding saliency maps. For boundary refinement, we develop a focus metric based on gradient and complementary information, integrating the salient features with the complementary infor-mation across images to emphasize focused regions and produce a high-quality initial decision result. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms 12 state-of-the-art methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. We have realized codes in https://github.com/Lihyua/GICI

Dual-Stage Safe Herding Framework for Adversarial Attacker in Dynamic Environment

Recent advances in robotics have enabled the widespread deployment of autonomous robotic systems in complex operational environments, presenting both unprecedented opportunities and significant security problems. Traditional shepherding approaches based on fixed formations are often ineffective or risky in urban and obstacle-rich scenarios, especially when facing adversarial agents with unknown and adaptive behaviors. This paper addresses this challenge as an extended herding problem, where defensive robotic systems must safely guide adversarial agents with unknown strategies away from protected areas and into predetermined safe regions, while maintaining collision-free navigation in dynamic environments. We propose a hierarchical hybrid framework based on reach-avoid game theory and local motion planning, incorporating a virtual containment boundary and event-triggered pursuit mechanisms to enable scalable and robust multi-agent coordination. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves safe and efficient guidance of adversarial agents to designated regions.

OmniVTLA: Vision-Tactile-Language-Action Model with Semantic-Aligned Tactile Sensing

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models build upon vision-language foundations, and have achieved promising results and exhibit the possibility of task generalization in robot manipulation. However, due to the heterogeneity of tactile sensors and the difficulty of acquiring tactile data, current VLA models significantly overlook the importance of tactile perception and fail in contact-rich tasks. To address this issue, this paper proposes OmniVTLA, a novel architecture involving tactile sensing. Specifically, our contributions are threefold. First, our OmniVTLA features a dual-path tactile encoder framework. This framework enhances tactile perception across diverse vision-based and force-based tactile sensors by using a pretrained vision transformer (ViT) and a semantically-aligned tactile ViT (SA-ViT). Second, we introduce ObjTac, a comprehensive force-based tactile dataset capturing textual, visual, and tactile information for 56 objects across 10 categories. With 135K tri-modal samples, ObjTac supplements existing visuo-tactile datasets. Third, leveraging this dataset, we train a semantically-aligned tactile encoder to learn a unified tactile representation, serving as a better initialization for OmniVTLA. Real-world experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving 96.9% success rates with grippers, (21.9% higher over baseline) and 100% success rates with dexterous hands (6.2% higher over baseline) in pick-and-place tasks. Besides, OmniVTLA significantly reduces task completion time and generates smoother trajectories through tactile sensing compared to existing VLA.