dTRPO: Trajectory Reduction in Policy Optimization of Diffusion Large Language Models

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduce a new paradigm for language generation, which in turn presents new challenges for aligning them with human preferences. In this work, we aim to improve the policy optimization for dLLMs by reducing the cost of the trajectory probability calculation, thereby enabling scaled-up offline policy training. We prove that: (i) under reference policy regularization, the probability ratio of the newly unmasked tokens is an unbiased estimate of that of intermediate diffusion states, and (ii) the probability of the full trajectory can be effectively estimated with a single forward pass of a re-masked final state. By integrating these two trajectory reduction strategies into a policy optimization objective, we propose Trajectory Reduction Policy Optimization (dTRPO). We evaluate dTRPO on 7B dLLMs across instruction-following and reasoning benchmarks. Results show that it substantially improves the core performance of state-of-the-art dLLMs, achieving gains of up to 9.6% on STEM tasks, up to 4.3% on coding tasks, and up to 3.0% on instruction-following tasks. Moreover, dTRPO exhibits strong training efficiency due to its offline, single-forward nature, and achieves improved generation efficiency through high-quality outputs.

Multi-Agent SAC Enabled Beamforming Design for Joint Secret Key Generation and Data Transmission

Physical layer key generation (PLKG) has emerged as a promising solution for achieving highly secured and low-latency key distribution, offering information-theoretic security that is inherently resilient to quantum attacks. However, simultaneously ensuring a high data transmission rate and a high secret key generation rate under eavesdropping attacks remains a major challenge. In time-division duplex (TDD) systems with multiple antennas, we derive closed-form expressions for both rates by modeling the legitimate channel as a time-correlated autoregressive (AR) process. This formulation leads to a highly nonconvex and time-coupled optimization problem, rendering traditional optimization methods ineffective. To address this issue, we propose a multi-agent soft actor-critic (SAC) framework equipped with a long short-term memory (LSTM) adversary prediction module to cope with the partial observability of the eavesdropper's mode. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior performance compared with other benchmark algorithms, while effectively balancing the trade-off between secret key generation rate and data transmission rate. The results also confirm the robustness of the proposed framework against intelligent eavesdropping and partial observation uncertainty.

CiteLLM: An Agentic Platform for Trustworthy Scientific Reference Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) have created new opportunities to enhance the efficiency of scholarly activities; however, challenges persist in the ethical deployment of AI assistance, including (1) the trustworthiness of AI-generated content, (2) preservation of academic integrity and intellectual property, and (3) protection of information privacy. In this work, we present CiteLLM, a specialized agentic platform designed to enable trustworthy reference discovery for grounding author-drafted claims and statements. The system introduces a novel interaction paradigm by embedding LLM utilities directly within the LaTeX editor environment, ensuring a seamless user experience and no data transmission outside the local system. To guarantee hallucination-free references, we employ dynamic discipline-aware routing to retrieve candidates exclusively from trusted web-based academic repositories, while leveraging LLMs solely for generating context-aware search queries, ranking candidates by relevance, and validating and explaining support through paragraph-level semantic matching and an integrated chatbot. Evaluation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed system in returning valid and highly usable references.

Robust Pedestrian Detection with Uncertain Modality

Existing cross-modal pedestrian detection (CMPD) employs complementary information from RGB and thermal-infrared (TIR) modalities to detect pedestrians in 24h-surveillance systems.RGB captures rich pedestrian details under daylight, while TIR excels at night. However, TIR focuses primarily on the person's silhouette, neglecting critical texture details essential for detection. While the near-infrared (NIR) captures texture under low-light conditions, which effectively alleviates performance issues of RGB and detail loss in TIR, thereby reducing missed detections. To this end, we construct a new Triplet RGB-NIR-TIR (TRNT) dataset, comprising 8,281 pixel-aligned image triplets, establishing a comprehensive foundation for algorithmic research. However, due to the variable nature of real-world scenarios, imaging devices may not always capture all three modalities simultaneously. This results in input data with unpredictable combinations of modal types, which challenge existing CMPD methods that fail to extract robust pedestrian information under arbitrary input combinations, leading to significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose the Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Network (AUNet) for accurately discriminating modal availability and fully utilizing the available information under uncertain inputs. Specifically, we introduce Unified Modality Validation Refinement (UMVR), which includes an uncertainty-aware router to validate modal availability and a semantic refinement to ensure the reliability of information within the modality. Furthermore, we design a Modality-Aware Interaction (MAI) module to adaptively activate or deactivate its internal interaction mechanisms per UMVR output, enabling effective complementary information fusion from available modalities.

Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence

We introduce Kimi K2.5, an open-source multimodal agentic model designed to advance general agentic intelligence. K2.5 emphasizes the joint optimization of text and vision so that two modalities enhance each other. This includes a series of techniques such as joint text-vision pre-training, zero-vision SFT, and joint text-vision reinforcement learning. Building on this multimodal foundation, K2.5 introduces Agent Swarm, a self-directed parallel agent orchestration framework that dynamically decomposes complex tasks into heterogeneous sub-problems and executes them concurrently. Extensive evaluations show that Kimi K2.5 achieves state-of-the-art results across various domains including coding, vision, reasoning, and agentic tasks. Agent Swarm also reduces latency by up to $4.5\times$ over single-agent baselines. We release the post-trained Kimi K2.5 model checkpoint to facilitate future research and real-world applications of agentic intelligence.

HardSecBench: Benchmarking the Security Awareness of LLMs for Hardware Code Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly integrated into practical hardware and firmware development pipelines for code generation. Existing studies have primarily focused on evaluating the functional correctness of LLM-generated code, yet paid limited attention to its security issues. However, LLM-generated code that appears functionally sound may embed security flaws which could induce catastrophic damages after deployment. This critical research gap motivates us to design a benchmark for assessing security awareness under realistic specifications. In this work, we introduce HardSecBench, a benchmark with 924 tasks spanning Verilog Register Transfer Level (RTL) and firmware-level C, covering 76 hardware-relevant Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entries. Each task includes a structured specification, a secure reference implementation, and executable tests. To automate artifact synthesis, we propose a multi-agent pipeline that decouples synthesis from verification and grounds evaluation in execution evidence, enabling reliable evaluation. Using HardSecBench, we evaluate a range of LLMs on hardware and firmware code generation and find that models often satisfy functional requirements while still leaving security risks. We also find that security results vary with prompting. These findings highlight pressing challenges and offer actionable insights for future advancements in LLM-assisted hardware design. Our data and code will be released soon.

QASA: Quality-Guided K-Adaptive Slot Attention for Unsupervised Object-Centric Learning

Slot Attention, an approach that binds different objects in a scene to a set of "slots", has become a leading method in unsupervised object-centric learning. Most methods assume a fixed slot count K, and to better accommodate the dynamic nature of object cardinality, a few works have explored K-adaptive variants. However, existing K-adaptive methods still suffer from two limitations. First, they do not explicitly constrain slot-binding quality, so low-quality slots lead to ambiguous feature attribution. Second, adding a slot-count penalty to the reconstruction objective creates conflicting optimization goals between reducing the number of active slots and maintaining reconstruction fidelity. As a result, they still lag significantly behind strong K-fixed baselines. To address these challenges, we propose Quality-Guided K-Adaptive Slot Attention (QASA). First, we decouple slot selection from reconstruction, eliminating the mutual constraints between the two objectives. Then, we propose an unsupervised Slot-Quality metric to assess per-slot quality, providing a principled signal for fine-grained slot--object binding. Based on this metric, we design a Quality-Guided Slot Selection scheme that dynamically selects a subset of high-quality slots and feeds them into our newly designed gated decoder for reconstruction during training. At inference, token-wise competition on slot attention yields a K-adaptive outcome. Experiments show that QASA substantially outperforms existing K-adaptive methods on both real and synthetic datasets. Moreover, on real-world datasets QASA surpasses K-fixed methods.

The Llama 4 Herd: Architecture, Training, Evaluation, and Deployment Notes

This document consolidates publicly reported technical details about Metas Llama 4 model family. It summarizes (i) released variants (Scout and Maverick) and the broader herd context including the previewed Behemoth teacher model, (ii) architectural characteristics beyond a high-level MoE description covering routed/shared-expert structure, early-fusion multimodality, and long-context design elements reported for Scout (iRoPE and length generalization strategies), (iii) training disclosures spanning pre-training, mid-training for long-context extension, and post-training methodology (lightweight SFT, online RL, and lightweight DPO) as described in release materials, (iv) developer-reported benchmark results for both base and instruction-tuned checkpoints, and (v) practical deployment constraints observed across major serving environments, including provider-specific context limits and quantization packaging. The manuscript also summarizes licensing obligations relevant to redistribution and derivative naming, and reviews publicly described safeguards and evaluation practices. The goal is to provide a compact technical reference for researchers and practitioners who need precise, source-backed facts about Llama 4.

VideoAuto-R1: Video Auto Reasoning via Thinking Once, Answering Twice

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for multimodal large language models on video understanding tasks. However, its necessity and advantages over direct answering remain underexplored. In this paper, we first demonstrate that for RL-trained video models, direct answering often matches or even surpasses CoT performance, despite CoT producing step-by-step analyses at a higher computational cost. Motivated by this, we propose VideoAuto-R1, a video understanding framework that adopts a reason-when-necessary strategy. During training, our approach follows a Thinking Once, Answering Twice paradigm: the model first generates an initial answer, then performs reasoning, and finally outputs a reviewed answer. Both answers are supervised via verifiable rewards. During inference, the model uses the confidence score of the initial answer to determine whether to proceed with reasoning. Across video QA and grounding benchmarks, VideoAuto-R1 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly improved efficiency, reducing the average response length by ~3.3x, e.g., from 149 to just 44 tokens. Moreover, we observe a low rate of thinking-mode activation on perception-oriented tasks, but a higher rate on reasoning-intensive tasks. This suggests that explicit language-based reasoning is generally beneficial but not always necessary.

Fast, accurate measurement of the worker populations of honey bee colonies using deep learning

Honey bees play a crucial role in pollination, contributing significantly to global agriculture and ecosystems. Accurately estimating hive populations is essential for understanding the effects of environmental factors on bee colonies, yet traditional methods of counting bees are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to human error, particularly in large-scale studies. In this paper, we present a deep learning-based solution for automating bee population counting using CSRNet and introduce ASUBEE, the FIRST high-resolution dataset specifically designed for this task. Our method employs density map estimation to predict bee populations, effectively addressing challenges such as occlusion and overlapping bees that are common in hive monitoring. We demonstrate that CSRNet achieves superior performance in terms of time efficiency, with a computation time of just 1 second per image, while delivering accurate counts even in complex and densely populated hive scenarios. Our findings show that deep learning approaches like CSRNet can dramatically enhance the efficiency of hive population assessments, providing a valuable tool for researchers and beekeepers alike. This work marks a significant advancement in applying AI technologies to ecological research, offering scalable and precise monitoring solutions for honey bee populations.