Mutual Information-Empowered Task-Oriented Communication: Principles, Applications and Challenges

Mutual information (MI)-based guidelines have recently proven to be effective for designing task-oriented communication systems, where the ultimate goal is to extract and transmit task-relevant information for downstream task. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of MI-empowered task-oriented communication, highlighting how MI-based methods can serve as a unifying design framework in various task-oriented communication scenarios. We begin with the roadmap of MI for designing task-oriented communication systems, and then introduce the roles and applications of MI to guide feature encoding, transmission optimization, and efficient training with two case studies. We further elaborate the limitations and challenges of MI-based methods. Finally, we identify several open issues in MI-based task-oriented communication to inspire future research.

Task-Oriented Feature Compression for Multimodal Understanding via Device-Edge Co-Inference

With the rapid development of large multimodal models (LMMs), multimodal understanding applications are emerging. As most LMM inference requests originate from edge devices with limited computational capabilities, the predominant inference pipeline involves directly forwarding the input data to an edge server which handles all computations. However, this approach introduces high transmission latency due to limited uplink bandwidth of edge devices and significant computation latency caused by the prohibitive number of visual tokens, thus hindering delay-sensitive tasks and degrading user experience. To address this challenge, we propose a task-oriented feature compression (TOFC) method for multimodal understanding in a device-edge co-inference framework, where visual features are merged by clustering and encoded by a learnable and selective entropy model before feature projection. Specifically, we employ density peaks clustering based on K nearest neighbors to reduce the number of visual features, thereby minimizing both data transmission and computational complexity. Subsequently, a learnable entropy model with hyperprior is utilized to encode and decode merged features, further reducing transmission overhead. To enhance compression efficiency, multiple entropy models are adaptively selected based on the characteristics of the visual features, enabling a more accurate estimation of the probability distribution. Comprehensive experiments on seven visual question answering benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed TOFC method. Results show that TOFC achieves up to 60% reduction in data transmission overhead and 50% reduction in system latency while maintaining identical task performance, compared with traditional image compression methods.

VideoScan: Enabling Efficient Streaming Video Understanding via Frame-level Semantic Carriers

This paper introduces VideoScan, an efficient vision-language model (VLM) inference framework designed for real-time video interaction that effectively comprehends and retains streamed video inputs while delivering rapid and accurate responses. A longstanding challenge in video understanding--particularly for long-term or real-time applications--stems from the substantial computational overhead caused by the extensive length of visual tokens. To address this, VideoScan employs a single semantic carrier token to represent each frame, progressively reducing computational and memory overhead during its two-phase inference process: prefilling and decoding. The embedding of the semantic carrier token is derived from an optimized aggregation of frame-level visual features, ensuring compact yet semantically rich representations. Critically, the corresponding key-value pairs are trained to retain contextual semantics from prior frames, enabling efficient memory management without sacrificing temporal coherence. During inference, the visual tokens of each frame are processed only once during the prefilling phase and subsequently discarded in the decoding stage, eliminating redundant computations. This design ensures efficient VLM inference even under stringent real-time constraints. Comprehensive experiments on diverse offline and online benchmarks demonstrate that LLaVA-Video, supported by our method, achieves up to $\sim 5\times$ and $1.29\times$ speedups compared to its original version and previous efficient streaming video understanding approaches, respectively. Crucially, these improvements are attained while maintaining competitive performance and ensuring stable GPU memory consumption (consistently $\sim 18$GB, independent of video duration).

Privacy-Enhancing Paradigms within Federated Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have proven highly effective in solving complex problems by integrating multiple agents, each performing different roles. However, in sensitive domains, they face emerging privacy protection challenges. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Federated MAS, highlighting the fundamental differences between Federated MAS and traditional FL. We then identify key challenges in developing Federated MAS, including: 1) heterogeneous privacy protocols among agents, 2) structural differences in multi-party conversations, and 3) dynamic conversational network structures. To address these challenges, we propose Embedded Privacy-Enhancing Agents (EPEAgent), an innovative solution that integrates seamlessly into the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) phase and the context retrieval stage. This solution minimizes data flows, ensuring that only task-relevant, agent-specific information is shared. Additionally, we design and generate a comprehensive dataset to evaluate the proposed paradigm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EPEAgent effectively enhances privacy protection while maintaining strong system performance. The code will be availiable at https://github.com/ZitongShi/EPEAgent

Keeping Yourself is Important in Downstream Tuning Multimodal Large Language Model

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and linguistic reasoning to address complex tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. While MLLMs demonstrate remarkable versatility, MLLMs appears limited performance on special applications. But tuning MLLMs for downstream tasks encounters two key challenges: Task-Expert Specialization, where distribution shifts between pre-training and target datasets constrain target performance, and Open-World Stabilization, where catastrophic forgetting erases the model general knowledge. In this work, we systematically review recent advancements in MLLM tuning methodologies, classifying them into three paradigms: (I) Selective Tuning, (II) Additive Tuning, and (III) Reparameterization Tuning. Furthermore, we benchmark these tuning strategies across popular MLLM architectures and diverse downstream tasks to establish standardized evaluation analysis and systematic tuning principles. Finally, we highlight several open challenges in this domain and propose future research directions. To facilitate ongoing progress in this rapidly evolving field, we provide a public repository that continuously tracks developments: https://github.com/WenkeHuang/Awesome-MLLM-Tuning.

KV-Edit: Training-Free Image Editing for Precise Background Preservation

Background consistency remains a significant challenge in image editing tasks. Despite extensive developments, existing works still face a trade-off between maintaining similarity to the original image and generating content that aligns with the target. Here, we propose KV-Edit, a training-free approach that uses KV cache in DiTs to maintain background consistency, where background tokens are preserved rather than regenerated, eliminating the need for complex mechanisms or expensive training, ultimately generating new content that seamlessly integrates with the background within user-provided regions. We further explore the memory consumption of the KV cache during editing and optimize the space complexity to $O(1)$ using an inversion-free method. Our approach is compatible with any DiT-based generative model without additional training. Experiments demonstrate that KV-Edit significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of both background and image quality, even surpassing training-based methods. Project webpage is available at https://xilluill.github.io/projectpages/KV-Edit

Dynamics-Aware Gaussian Splatting Streaming Towards Fast On-the-Fly Training for 4D Reconstruction

The recent development of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has led to great interest in 4D dynamic spatial reconstruction from multi-view visual inputs. While existing approaches mainly rely on processing full-length multi-view videos for 4D reconstruction, there has been limited exploration of iterative online reconstruction methods that enable on-the-fly training and per-frame streaming. Current 3DGS-based streaming methods treat the Gaussian primitives uniformly and constantly renew the densified Gaussians, thereby overlooking the difference between dynamic and static features and also neglecting the temporal continuity in the scene. To address these limitations, we propose a novel three-stage pipeline for iterative streamable 4D dynamic spatial reconstruction. Our pipeline comprises a selective inheritance stage to preserve temporal continuity, a dynamics-aware shift stage for distinguishing dynamic and static primitives and optimizing their movements, and an error-guided densification stage to accommodate emerging objects. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in online 4D reconstruction, demonstrating a 20% improvement in on-the-fly training speed, superior representation quality, and real-time rendering capability. Project page: https://www.liuzhening.top/DASS

AI Flow at the Network Edge

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal variants have led to remarkable progress across various domains, demonstrating impressive capabilities and unprecedented potential. In the era of ubiquitous connectivity, leveraging communication networks to distribute intelligence is a transformative concept, envisioning AI-powered services accessible at the network edge. However, pushing large models from the cloud to resource-constrained environments faces critical challenges. Model inference on low-end devices leads to excessive latency and performance bottlenecks, while raw data transmission over limited bandwidth networks causes high communication overhead. This article presents AI Flow, a framework that streamlines the inference process by jointly leveraging the heterogeneous resources available across devices, edge nodes, and cloud servers, making intelligence flow across networks. To facilitate cooperation among multiple computational nodes, the proposed framework explores a paradigm shift in the design of communication network systems from transmitting information flow to intelligence flow, where the goal of communications is task-oriented and folded into the inference process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework through an image captioning use case, showcasing the ability to reduce response latency while maintaining high-quality captions. This article serves as a position paper for identifying the motivation, challenges, and principles of AI Flow.

EVA-Gaussian: 3D Gaussian-based Real-time Human Novel View Synthesis under Diverse Camera Settings

The feed-forward based 3D Gaussian Splatting method has demonstrated exceptional capability in real-time human novel view synthesis. However, existing approaches are restricted to dense viewpoint settings, which limits their flexibility in free-viewpoint rendering across a wide range of camera view angle discrepancies. To address this limitation, we propose a real-time pipeline named EVA-Gaussian for 3D human novel view synthesis across diverse camera settings. Specifically, we first introduce an Efficient cross-View Attention (EVA) module to accurately estimate the position of each 3D Gaussian from the source images. Then, we integrate the source images with the estimated Gaussian position map to predict the attributes and feature embeddings of the 3D Gaussians. Moreover, we employ a recurrent feature refiner to correct artifacts caused by geometric errors in position estimation and enhance visual fidelity.To further improve synthesis quality, we incorporate a powerful anchor loss function for both 3D Gaussian attributes and human face landmarks. Experimental results on the THuman2.0 and THumansit datasets showcase the superiority of our EVA-Gaussian approach in rendering quality across diverse camera settings. Project page: https://zhenliuzju.github.io/huyingdong/EVA-Gaussian.

WirelessAgent: Large Language Model Agents for Intelligent Wireless Networks

Wireless networks are increasingly facing challenges due to their expanding scale and complexity. These challenges underscore the need for advanced AI-driven strategies, particularly in the upcoming 6G networks. In this article, we introduce WirelessAgent, a novel approach leveraging large language models (LLMs) to develop AI agents capable of managing complex tasks in wireless networks. It can effectively improve network performance through advanced reasoning, multimodal data processing, and autonomous decision making. Thereafter, we demonstrate the practical applicability and benefits of WirelessAgent for network slicing management. The experimental results show that WirelessAgent is capable of accurately understanding user intent, effectively allocating slice resources, and consistently maintaining optimal performance.