HCRE: LLM-based Hierarchical Classification for Cross-Document Relation Extraction with a Prediction-then-Verification Strategy

Cross-document relation extraction (RE) aims to identify relations between the head and tail entities located in different documents. Existing approaches typically adopt the paradigm of ``\textit{Small Language Model (SLM) + Classifier}''. However, the limited language understanding ability of SLMs hinders further improvement of their performance. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary study to explore the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in cross-document RE. Despite their extensive parameters, our findings indicate that LLMs do not consistently surpass existing SLMs. Further analysis suggests that the underperformance is largely attributed to the challenges posed by the numerous predefined relations. To overcome this issue, we propose an LLM-based \underline{H}ierarchical \underline{C}lassification model for cross-document \underline{RE} (HCRE), which consists of two core components: 1) an LLM for relation prediction and 2) a \textit{hierarchical relation tree} derived from the predefined relation set. This tree enables the LLM to perform hierarchical classification, where the target relation is inferred level by level. Since the number of child nodes is much smaller than the size of the entire predefined relation set, the hierarchical relation tree significantly reduces the number of relation options that LLM needs to consider during inference. However, hierarchical classification introduces the risk of error propagation across levels. To mitigate this, we propose a \textit{prediction-then-verification} inference strategy that improves prediction reliability through multi-view verification at each level. Extensive experiments show that HCRE outperforms existing baselines, validating its effectiveness.

RASR: Retrieval-Augmented Semantic Reasoning for Fake News Video Detection

Multimodal fake news video detection is a crucial research direction for maintaining the credibility of online information. Existing studies primarily verify content authenticity by constructing multimodal feature fusion representations or utilizing pre-trained language models to analyze video-text consistency. However, these methods still face the following limitations: (1) lacking cross-instance global semantic correlations, making it difficult to effectively utilize historical associative evidence to verify the current video; (2) semantic discrepancies across domains hinder the transfer of general knowledge, lacking the guidance of domain-specific expert knowledge. To this end, we propose a novel Retrieval-Augmented Semantic Reasoning (RASR) framework. First, a Cross-instance Semantic Parser and Retriever (CSPR) deconstructs the video into high-level semantic primitives and retrieves relevant associative evidence from a dynamic memory bank. Subsequently, a Domain-Guided Multimodal Reasoning (DGMP) module incorporates domain priors to drive an expert multimodal large language model in generating domain-aware, in-depth analysis reports. Finally, a Multi-View Feature Decoupling and Fusion (MVDFF) module integrates multi-dimensional features through an adaptive gating mechanism to achieve robust authenticity determination. Extensive experiments on the FakeSV and FakeTT datasets demonstrate that RASR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieves superior cross-domain generalization, and improves the overall detection accuracy by up to 0.93%.

Learning Task-Invariant Properties via Dreamer: Enabling Efficient Policy Transfer for Quadruped Robots

Achieving quadruped robot locomotion across diverse and dynamic terrains presents significant challenges, primarily due to the discrepancies between simulation environments and real-world conditions. Traditional sim-to-real transfer methods often rely on manual feature design or costly real-world fine-tuning. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the DreamTIP framework, which incorporates Task-Invariant Properties learning within the Dreamer world model architecture to enhance sim-to-real transfer capabilities. Guided by large language models, DreamTIP identifies and leverages Task-Invariant Properties, such as contact stability and terrain clearance, which exhibit robustness to dynamic variations and strong transferability across tasks. These properties are integrated into the world model as auxiliary prediction targets, enabling the policy to learn representations that are insensitive to underlying dynamic changes. Furthermore, an efficient adaptation strategy is designed, employing a mixed replay buffer and regularization constraints to rapidly calibrate to real-world dynamics while effectively mitigating representation collapse and catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on complex terrains, including Stair, Climb, Tilt, and Crawl, demonstrate that DreamTIP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both simulated and real-world environments. Our method achieves an average performance improvement of 28.1% across eight distinct simulated transfer tasks. In the real-world Climb task, the baseline method achieved only a 10\ success rate, whereas our method attained a 100% success rate. These results indicate that incorporating Task-Invariant Properties into Dreamer learning offers a novel solution for achieving robust and transferable robot locomotion.

EvaNet: Towards More Efficient and Consistent Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Assessment

Evaluation is essential in image fusion research, yet most existing metrics are directly borrowed from other vision tasks without proper adaptation. These traditional metrics, often based on complex image transformations, not only fail to capture the true quality of the fusion results but also are computationally demanding. To address these issues, we propose a unified evaluation framework specifically tailored for image fusion. At its core is a lightweight network designed efficiently to approximate widely used metrics, following a divide-and-conquer strategy. Unlike conventional approaches that directly assess similarity between fused and source images, we first decompose the fusion result into infrared and visible components. The evaluation model is then used to measure the degree of information preservation in these separated components, effectively disentangling the fusion evaluation process. During training, we incorporate a contrastive learning strategy and inform our evaluation model by perceptual scene assessment provided by a large language model. Last, we propose the first consistency evaluation framework, which measures the alignment between image fusion metrics and human visual perception, using both independent no-reference scores and downstream tasks performance as objective references. Extensive experiments show that our learning-based evaluation paradigm delivers both superior efficiency (up to 1,000 times faster) and greater consistency across a range of standard image fusion benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/AWCXV/EvaNet.

FlowPIE: Test-Time Scientific Idea Evolution with Flow-Guided Literature Exploration

Scientific idea generation (SIG) is critical to AI-driven autonomous research, yet existing approaches are often constrained by a static retrieval-then-generation paradigm, leading to homogeneous and insufficiently divergent ideas. In this work, we propose FlowPIE, a tightly coupled retrieval-generation framework that treats literature exploration and idea generation as a co-evolving process. FlowPIE expands literature trajectories via a flow-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) inspired by GFlowNets, using the quality of current ideas assessed by an LLM-based generative reward model (GRM) as a supervised signal to guide adaptive retrieval and construct a diverse, high-quality initial population. Based on this population, FlowPIE models idea generation as a test-time idea evolution process, applying selection, crossover, and mutation with the isolation island paradigm and GRM-based fitness computation to incorporate cross-domain knowledge. It effectively mitigates the information cocoons arising from over-reliance on parametric knowledge and static literature. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that FlowPIE consistently produces ideas with higher novelty, feasibility and diversity compared to strong LLM-based and agent-based frameworks, while enabling reward scaling during test time.

Taming the Instability: A Robust Second-Order Optimizer for Federated Learning over Non-IID Data

In this paper, we present Federated Robust Curvature Optimization (FedRCO), a novel second-order optimization framework designed to improve convergence speed and reduce communication cost in Federated Learning systems under statistical heterogeneity. Existing second-order optimization methods are often computationally expensive and numerically unstable in distributed settings. In contrast, FedRCO addresses these challenges by integrating an efficient approximate curvature optimizer with a provable stability mechanism. Specifically, FedRCO incorporates three key components: (1) a Gradient Anomaly Monitor that detects and mitigates exploding gradients in real-time, (2) a Fail-Safe Resilience protocol that resets optimization states upon numerical instability, and (3) a Curvature-Preserving Adaptive Aggregation strategy that safely integrates global knowledge without erasing the local curvature geometry. Theoretical analysis shows that FedRCO can effectively mitigate instability and prevent unbounded updates while preserving optimization efficiency. Extensive experiments show that FedRCO achieves superior robustness against diverse non-IID scenarios while achieving higher accuracy and faster convergence than both state-of-the-art first-order and second-order methods.

ArtHOI: Taming Foundation Models for Monocular 4D Reconstruction of Hand-Articulated-Object Interactions

Existing hand-object interactions (HOI) methods are largely limited to rigid objects, while 4D reconstruction methods of articulated objects generally require pre-scanning the object or even multi-view videos. It remains an unexplored but significant challenge to reconstruct 4D human-articulated-object interactions from a single monocular RGB video. Fortunately, recent advancements in foundation models present a new opportunity to address this highly ill-posed problem. To this end, we introduce ArtHOI, an optimization-based framework that integrates and refines priors from multiple foundation models. Our key contribution is a suite of novel methodologies designed to resolve the inherent inaccuracies and physical unreality of these priors. In particular, we introduce an Adaptive Sampling Refinement (ASR) method to optimize object's metric scale and pose for grounding its normalized mesh in world space. Furthermore, we propose a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) guided hand-object alignment method, utilizing contact reasoning information as constraints of hand-object mesh composition optimization. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation, we also contribute two new datasets, ArtHOI-RGBD and ArtHOI-Wild. Extensive experiments validate the robustness and effectiveness of our ArtHOI across diverse objects and interactions. Project: https://arthoi-reconstruction.github.io.

AgenticRec: End-to-End Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization for Ranking-Oriented Recommender Agents

Recommender agents built on Large Language Models offer a promising paradigm for recommendation. However, existing recommender agents typically suffer from a disconnect between intermediate reasoning and final ranking feedback, and are unable to capture fine-grained preferences. To address this, we present AgenticRec, a ranking-oriented agentic recommendation framework that optimizes the entire decision-making trajectory (including intermediate reasoning, tool invocation, and final ranking list generation) under sparse implicit feedback. Our approach makes three key contributions. First, we design a suite of recommendation-specific tools integrated into a ReAct loop to support evidence-grounded reasoning. Second, we propose theoretically unbiased List-Wise Group Relative Policy Optimization (list-wise GRPO) to maximize ranking utility, ensuring accurate credit assignment for complex tool-use trajectories. Third, we introduce Progressive Preference Refinement (PPR) to resolve fine-grained preference ambiguities. By mining hard negatives from ranking violations and applying bidirectional preference alignment, PPR minimizes the convex upper bound of pairwise ranking errors. Experiments on benchmarks confirm that AgenticRec significantly outperforms baselines, validating the necessity of unifying reasoning, tool use, and ranking optimization.

Beyond Strict Pairing: Arbitrarily Paired Training for High-Performance Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion(IVIF) combines complementary modalities while preserving natural textures and salient thermal signatures. Existing solutions predominantly rely on extensive sets of rigidly aligned image pairs for training. However, acquiring such data is often impractical due to the costly and labour-intensive alignment process. Besides, maintaining a rigid pairing setting during training restricts the volume of cross-modal relationships, thereby limiting generalisation performance. To this end, this work challenges the necessity of Strictly Paired Training Paradigm (SPTP) by systematically investigating UnPaired and Arbitrarily Paired Training Paradigms (UPTP and APTP) for high-performance IVIF. We establish a theoretical objective of APTP, reflecting the complementary nature between UPTP and SPTP. More importantly, we develop a practical framework capable of significantly enriching cross-modal relationships even with severely limited and unaligned training data. To validate our propositions, three end-to-end lightweight baselines, alongside a set of innovative loss functions, are designed to cover three classic frameworks (CNN, Transformer, GAN). Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed APTP and UPTP are feasible and capable of training models on a severely limited and content-inconsistent infrared and visible dataset, achieving performance comparable to that of a dataset 100$\times$ larger in SPTP. This finding fundamentally alleviates the cost and difficulty of data collection while enhancing model robustness from the data perspective, delivering a feasible solution for IVIF studies. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/yanglinDeng/IVIF_unpair}{\textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/yanglinDeng/IVIF\_unpair}}.

FusionRegister: Every Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Deserves Registration

Spatial registration across different visual modalities is a critical but formidable step in multi-modality image fusion for real-world perception. Although several methods are proposed to address this issue, the existing registration-based fusion methods typically require extensive pre-registration operations, limiting their efficiency. To overcome these limitations, a general cross-modality registration method guided by visual priors is proposed for infrared and visible image fusion task, termed FusionRegister. Firstly, FusionRegister achieves robustness by learning cross-modality misregistration representations rather than forcing alignment of all differences, ensuring stable outputs even under challenging input conditions. Moreover, FusionRegister demonstrates strong generality by operating directly on fused results, where misregistration is explicitly represented and effectively handled, enabling seamless integration with diverse fusion methods while preserving their intrinsic properties. In addition, its efficiency is further enhanced by serving the backbone fusion method as a natural visual prior provider, which guides the registration process to focus only on mismatch regions, thereby avoiding redundant operations. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that FusionRegister not only inherits the fusion quality of state-of-the-art methods, but also delivers superior detail alignment and robustness, making it highly suitable for infrared and visible image fusion method. The code will be available at https://github.com/bociic/FusionRegister.