RAE-AR: Taming Autoregressive Models with Representation Autoencoders

The latent space of generative modeling is long dominated by the VAE encoder. The latents from the pretrained representation encoders (e.g., DINO, SigLIP, MAE) are previously considered inappropriate for generative modeling. Recently, RAE method lights the hope and reveals that the representation autoencoder can also achieve competitive performance as the VAE encoder. However, the integration of representation autoencoder into continuous autoregressive (AR) models, remains largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate the challenges of employing high-dimensional representation autoencoders within the AR paradigm, denoted as \textit{RAE-AR}. We focus on the unique properties of AR models and identify two primary hurdles: complex token-wise distribution modeling and the high-dimensionality amplified training-inference gap (exposure bias). To address these, we introduce token simplification via distribution normalization to ease modeling difficulty and improve convergence. Furthermore, we enhance prediction robustness by incorporating Gaussian noise injection during training to mitigate exposure bias. Our empirical results demonstrate that these modifications substantially bridge the performance gap, enabling representation autoencoder to achieve results comparable to traditional VAEs on AR models. This work paves the way for a more unified architecture across visual understanding and generative modeling.

AeroTherm-GPT: A Verification-Centered LLM Framework for Thermal Protection System Engineering Workflows

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into hypersonic thermal protection system (TPS) design is bottlenecked by cascading constraint violations when generating executable simulation artifacts. General-purpose LLMs, treating generation as single-pass text completion, fail to satisfy the sequential, multi-gate constraints inherent in safety-critical engineering workflows. To address this, we propose AeroTherm-GPT, the first TPS-specialized LLM Agent, instantiated through a Constraint-Closed-Loop Generation (CCLG) framework. CCLG organizes TPS artifact generation as an iterative workflow comprising generation, validation, CDG-guided repair, execution, and audit. The Constraint Dependency Graph (CDG) encodes empirical co-resolution structure among constraint categories, directing repair toward upstream fault candidates based on lifecycle ordering priors and empirical co-resolution probabilities. This upstream-priority mechanism resolves multiple downstream violations per action, achieving a Root-Cause Fix Efficiency of 4.16 versus 1.76 for flat-checklist repair. Evaluated on HyTPS-Bench and validated against external benchmarks, AeroTherm-GPT achieves 88.7% End-to-End Success Rate (95% CI: 87.5-89.9), a gain of +12.5 pp over the matched non-CDG ablation baseline, without catastrophic forgetting on scientific reasoning and code generation tasks.

PPGL-Swarm: Integrated Multimodal Risk Stratification and Hereditary Syndrome Detection in Pheochromocytoma and Paraganglioma

Pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas (PPGLs) are rare neuroendocrine tumors, of which 15-25% develop metastatic disease with 5-year survival rates reported as low as 34%. PPGL may indicate hereditary syndromes requiring stricter, syndrome-specific treatment and surveillance, but clinicians often fail to recognize these associations in routine care. Clinical practice uses GAPP score for PPGL grading, but several limitations remain for PPGL diagnosis: (1) GAPP scoring demands a high workload for clinician because it requires the manual evaluation of six independent components; (2) key components such as cellularity and Ki-67 are often evaluated with subjective criteria; (3) several clinically relevant metastatic risk factors are not captured by GAPP, such as SDHB mutations, which have been associated with reported metastatic rates of 35-75%. Agent-driven diagnostic systems appear promising, but most lack traceable reasoning for decision-making and do not incorporate domain-specific knowledge such as PPGL genotype information. To address these limitations, we present PPGL-Swarm, an agentic PPGL diagnostic system that generates a comprehensive report, including automated GAPP scoring (with quantified cellularity and Ki-67), genotype risk alerts, and multimodal report with integrated evidence. The system provides an auditable reasoning trail by decomposing diagnosis into micro-tasks, each assigned to a specialized agent. The gene and table agents use knowledge enhancement to better interpret genotype and laboratory findings, and during training we use reinforcement learning to refine tool selection and task assignment.

Astrolabe: Steering Forward-Process Reinforcement Learning for Distilled Autoregressive Video Models

Distilled autoregressive (AR) video models enable efficient streaming generation but frequently misalign with human visual preferences. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks are not naturally suited to these architectures, typically requiring either expensive re-distillation or solver-coupled reverse-process optimization that introduces considerable memory and computational overhead. We present Astrolabe, an efficient online RL framework tailored for distilled AR models. To overcome existing bottlenecks, we introduce a forward-process RL formulation based on negative-aware fine-tuning. By contrasting positive and negative samples directly at inference endpoints, this approach establishes an implicit policy improvement direction without requiring reverse-process unrolling. To scale this alignment to long videos, we propose a streaming training scheme that generates sequences progressively via a rolling KV-cache, applying RL updates exclusively to local clip windows while conditioning on prior context to ensure long-range coherence. Finally, to mitigate reward hacking, we integrate a multi-reward objective stabilized by uncertainty-aware selective regularization and dynamic reference updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently enhances generation quality across multiple distilled AR video models, serving as a robust and scalable alignment solution.

OmniForcing: Unleashing Real-time Joint Audio-Visual Generation

Recent joint audio-visual diffusion models achieve remarkable generation quality but suffer from high latency due to their bidirectional attention dependencies, hindering real-time applications. We propose OmniForcing, the first framework to distill an offline, dual-stream bidirectional diffusion model into a high-fidelity streaming autoregressive generator. However, naively applying causal distillation to such dual-stream architectures triggers severe training instability, due to the extreme temporal asymmetry between modalities and the resulting token sparsity. We address the inherent information density gap by introducing an Asymmetric Block-Causal Alignment with a zero-truncation Global Prefix that prevents multi-modal synchronization drift. The gradient explosion caused by extreme audio token sparsity during the causal shift is further resolved through an Audio Sink Token mechanism equipped with an Identity RoPE constraint. Finally, a Joint Self-Forcing Distillation paradigm enables the model to dynamically self-correct cumulative cross-modal errors from exposure bias during long rollouts. Empowered by a modality-independent rolling KV-cache inference scheme, OmniForcing achieves state-of-the-art streaming generation at $\sim$25 FPS on a single GPU, maintaining multi-modal synchronization and visual quality on par with the bidirectional teacher.\textbf{Project Page:} \href{https://omniforcing.com}{https://omniforcing.com}

Retrieving Patient-Specific Radiomic Feature Sets for Transparent Knee MRI Assessment

Classical radiomic features are designed to quantify image appearance and intensity patterns. Compared with end-to-end deep learning (DL) models trained for disease classification, radiomics pipelines with low-dimensional parametric classifiers offer enhanced transparency and interpretability, yet often underperform because of the reliance on population-level predefined feature sets. Recent work on adaptive radiomics uses DL to predict feature weights over a radiomic pool, then thresholds these weights to retain the top-k features from large radiomic pool F (often ~10^3). However, such marginal ranking can over-admit redundant descriptors and overlook complementary feature interactions. We propose a patient-specific feature-set selection framework that predicts a single compact feature set per subject, targeting complementary and diverse evidence rather than marginal top-k features. To overcome the intractable combinatorial search space of F choose k features, our method utilizes a 2-stage retrieval strategy: randomly sample diverse candidate feature sets, then rank these sets with a learned scoring function to select a high-performing feature set for the specific patient. The system consists of a feature-set scorer, and a classifier that performs the final diagnosis. We empirically show that the proposed two-stage retrieval approximates the original exhaustive all k-feature selection. Validating on tasks including ACL tear detection and KL grading for osteoarthritis, the experimental results achieve diagnostic performance, outperforming the top-k approach with the same k values, and competitive with end-to-end DL models while maintaining high transparency. The model generates auditable feature sets that link clinical outcomes to specific anatomical regions and radiomic families, allowing clinicians to inspect which anatomical structures and quantitative descriptors drive the prediction.

Chain of Mindset: Reasoning with Adaptive Cognitive Modes

Human problem-solving is never the repetition of a single mindset, by which we mean a distinct mode of cognitive processing. When tackling a specific task, we do not rely on a single mindset; instead, we integrate multiple mindsets within the single solution process. However, existing LLM reasoning methods fall into a common trap: they apply the same fixed mindset across all steps, overlooking that different stages of solving the same problem require fundamentally different mindsets. This single-minded assumption prevents models from reaching the next level of intelligence. To address this limitation, we propose Chain of Mindset (CoM), a training-free agentic framework that enables step-level adaptive mindset orchestration. CoM decomposes reasoning into four functionally heterogeneous mindsets: Spatial, Convergent, Divergent, and Algorithmic. A Meta-Agent dynamically selects the optimal mindset based on the evolving reasoning state, while a bidirectional Context Gate filters cross-module information flow to maintain effectiveness and efficiency. Experiments across six challenging benchmarks spanning mathematics, code generation, scientific QA, and spatial reasoning demonstrate that CoM achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest baseline by 4.96\% and 4.72\% in overall accuracy on Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct and Gemini-2.0-Flash, while balancing reasoning efficiency. Our code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset}{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset}.

Spider-Sense: Intrinsic Risk Sensing for Efficient Agent Defense with Hierarchical Adaptive Screening

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, their real-world applicability has expanded significantly, accompanied by new security challenges. Most existing agent defense mechanisms adopt a mandatory checking paradigm, in which security validation is forcibly triggered at predefined stages of the agent lifecycle. In this work, we argue that effective agent security should be intrinsic and selective rather than architecturally decoupled and mandatory. We propose Spider-Sense framework, an event-driven defense framework based on Intrinsic Risk Sensing (IRS), which allows agents to maintain latent vigilance and trigger defenses only upon risk perception. Once triggered, the Spider-Sense invokes a hierarchical defence mechanism that trades off efficiency and precision: it resolves known patterns via lightweight similarity matching while escalating ambiguous cases to deep internal reasoning, thereby eliminating reliance on external models. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce S$^2$Bench, a lifecycle-aware benchmark featuring realistic tool execution and multi-stage attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spider-Sense achieves competitive or superior defense performance, attaining the lowest Attack Success Rate (ASR) and False Positive Rate (FPR), with only a marginal latency overhead of 8.3\%.

Bidirectional Reward-Guided Diffusion for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Diffusion-based super-resolution can synthesize rich details, but models trained on synthetic paired data often fail on real-world LR images due to distribution shifts. We propose Bird-SR, a bidirectional reward-guided diffusion framework that formulates super-resolution as trajectory-level preference optimization via reward feedback learning (ReFL), jointly leveraging synthetic LR-HR pairs and real-world LR images. For structural fidelity easily affected in ReFL, the model is directly optimized on synthetic pairs at early diffusion steps, which also facilitates structure preservation for real-world inputs under smaller distribution gap in structure levels. For perceptual enhancement, quality-guided rewards are applied at later sampling steps to both synthetic and real LR images. To mitigate reward hacking, the rewards for synthetic results are formulated in a relative advantage space bounded by their clean counterparts, while real-world optimization is regularized via a semantic alignment constraint. Furthermore, to balance structural and perceptual learning, we adopt a dynamic fidelity-perception weighting strategy that emphasizes structure preservation at early stages and progressively shifts focus toward perceptual optimization at later diffusion steps. Extensive experiments on real-world SR benchmarks demonstrate that Bird-SR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in perceptual quality while preserving structural consistency, validating its effectiveness for real-world super-resolution.

MambaNet: Mamba-assisted Channel Estimation Neural Network With Attention Mechanism

This paper proposes a Mamba-assisted neural network framework incorporating self-attention mechanism to achieve improved channel estimation with low complexity for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms, particularly for configurations with a large number of subcarriers. With the integration of customized Mamba architecture, the proposed framework handles large-scale subcarrier channel estimation efficiently while capturing long-distance dependencies among these subcarriers effectively. Unlike conventional Mamba structure, this paper implements a bidirectional selective scan to improve channel estimation performance, because channel gains at different subcarriers are non-causal. Moreover, the proposed framework exhibits relatively lower space complexity than transformer-based neural networks. Simulation results tested on the 3GPP TS 36.101 channel demonstrate that compared to other baseline neural network solutions, the proposed method achieves improved channel estimation performance with a reduced number of tunable parameters.