Dual-branch Graph Domain Adaptation for Cross-scenario Multi-modal Emotion Recognition

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) aims to predict speakers' emotional states in multi-turn dialogues through text, audio, and visual cues. In real-world settings, conversation scenarios differ significantly in speakers, topics, styles, and noise levels. Existing MERC methods generally neglect these cross-scenario variations, limiting their ability to transfer models trained on a source domain to unseen target domains. To address this issue, we propose a Dual-branch Graph Domain Adaptation framework (DGDA) for multimodal emotion recognition under cross-scenario conditions. We first construct an emotion interaction graph to characterize complex emotional dependencies among utterances. A dual-branch encoder, consisting of a hypergraph neural network (HGNN) and a path neural network (PathNN), is then designed to explicitly model multivariate relationships and implicitly capture global dependencies. To enable out-of-domain generalization, a domain adversarial discriminator is introduced to learn invariant representations across domains. Furthermore, a regularization loss is incorporated to suppress the negative influence of noisy labels. To the best of our knowledge, DGDA is the first MERC framework that jointly addresses domain shift and label noise. Theoretical analysis provides tighter generalization bounds, and extensive experiments on IEMOCAP and MELD demonstrate that DGDA consistently outperforms strong baselines and better adapts to cross-scenario conversations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xudmm1239439/DGDA-Net.

Identity-Consistent Video Generation under Large Facial-Angle Variations

Single-view reference-to-video methods often struggle to preserve identity consistency under large facial-angle variations. This limitation naturally motivates the incorporation of multi-view facial references. However, simply introducing additional reference images exacerbates the \textit{copy-paste} problem, particularly the \textbf{\textit{view-dependent copy-paste}} artifact, which reduces facial motion naturalness. Although cross-paired data can alleviate this issue, collecting such data is costly. To balance the consistency and naturalness, we propose $\mathrm{Mv}^2\mathrm{ID}$, a multi-view conditioned framework under in-paired supervision. We introduce a region-masking training strategy to prevent shortcut learning and extract essential identity features by encouraging the model to aggregate complementary identity cues across views. In addition, we design a reference decoupled-RoPE mechanism that assigns distinct positional encoding to video and conditioning tokens for better modeling of their heterogeneous properties. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale dataset with diverse facial-angle variations and propose dedicated evaluation metrics for identity consistency and motion naturalness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves identity consistency while maintaining motion naturalness, outperforming existing approaches trained with cross-paired data.

Dynamic Fusion-Aware Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversations (MERC) aims to identify and understand the emotions expressed by speakers during utterance interaction from multiple modalities (e.g., text, audio, images, etc.). Existing studies have shown that GCN can improve the performance of MERC by modeling dependencies between speakers. However, existing methods usually use fixed parameters to process multimodal features for different emotion types, ignoring the dynamics of fusion between different modalities, which forces the model to balance performance between multiple emotion categories, thus limiting the model's performance on some specific emotions. To this end, we propose a dynamic fusion-aware graph convolutional neural network (DF-GCN) for robust recognition of multimodal emotion features in conversations. Specifically, DF-GCN integrates ordinary differential equations into graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to {capture} the dynamic nature of emotional dependencies within utterance interaction networks and leverages the prompts generated by the global information vector (GIV) of the utterance to guide the dynamic fusion of multimodal features. This allows our model to dynamically change parameters when processing each utterance feature, so that different network parameters can be equipped for different emotion categories in the inference stage, thereby achieving more flexible emotion classification and enhancing the generalization ability of the model. Comprehensive experiments conducted on two public multimodal conversational datasets {confirm} that the proposed DF-GCN model delivers superior performance, benefiting significantly from the dynamic fusion mechanism introduced.

RoboStereo: Dual-Tower 4D Embodied World Models for Unified Policy Optimization

Scalable Embodied AI faces fundamental constraints due to prohibitive costs and safety risks of real-world interaction. While Embodied World Models (EWMs) offer promise through imagined rollouts, existing approaches suffer from geometric hallucinations and lack unified optimization frameworks for practical policy improvement. We introduce RoboStereo, a symmetric dual-tower 4D world model that employs bidirectional cross-modal enhancement to ensure spatiotemporal geometric consistency and alleviate physics hallucinations. Building upon this high-fidelity 4D simulator, we present the first unified framework for world-model-based policy optimization: (1) Test-Time Policy Augmentation (TTPA) for pre-execution verification, (2) Imitative-Evolutionary Policy Learning (IEPL) leveraging visual perceptual rewards to learn from expert demonstrations, and (3) Open-Exploration Policy Learning (OEPL) enabling autonomous skill discovery and self-correction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate RoboStereo achieves state-of-the-art generation quality, with our unified framework delivering >97% average relative improvement on fine-grained manipulation tasks.

Taming the Long Tail: Efficient Item-wise Sharpness-Aware Minimization for LLM-based Recommender Systems

Large Language Model-based Recommender Systems (LRSs) have recently emerged as a new paradigm in sequential recommendation by directly adopting LLMs as backbones. While LRSs demonstrate strong knowledge utilization and instruction-following abilities, they have not been systematically studied under the long-standing long-tail problem. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study and reveal that LRSs face two distinct types of long-tail: i) prior long-tail, inherited implicitly from pretraining corpora, and ii) data long-tail, originating from skewed recommendation datasets. Our analysis shows that both contribute to the performance disparity between head and tail items, with the intersection of the two heads exhibiting an even stronger head effect. Nevertheless, the overall performance distribution in LRSs, especially on the tail, remains dominated by the data long-tail. To address this challenge, we propose Efficient Item-wise Sharpness-Aware Minimization (EISAM), a novel optimization framework that improves tail-item performance by adaptively regularizing the loss landscape at the item level. EISAM introduces an efficient penalty design that captures fine-grained item-specific sharpness while maintaining computational scalability for LLMs. In addition, we derive a generalization bound for EISAM. Our theoretical analysis shows that the bound decreases at a faster rate under our item-wise regularization, offering theoretical support for its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that EISAM significantly boosts tail-item recommendation performance while preserving overall quality, establishing the first systematic solution to the long-tail problem in LRSs.

WS-Net: Weak-Signal Representation Learning and Gated Abundance Reconstruction for Hyperspectral Unmixing via State-Space and Weak Signal Attention Fusion

Weak spectral responses in hyperspectral images are often obscured by dominant endmembers and sensor noise, resulting in inaccurate abundance estimation. This paper introduces WS-Net, a deep unmixing framework specifically designed to address weak-signal collapse through state-space modelling and Weak Signal Attention fusion. The network features a multi-resolution wavelet-fused encoder that captures both high-frequency discontinuities and smooth spectral variations with a hybrid backbone that integrates a Mamba state-space branch for efficient long-range dependency modelling. It also incorporates a Weak Signal Attention branch that selectively enhances low-similarity spectral cues. A learnable gating mechanism adaptively fuses both representations, while the decoder leverages KL-divergence-based regularisation to enforce separability between dominant and weak endmembers. Experiments on one simulated and two real datasets (synthetic dataset, Samson, and Apex) demonstrate consistent improvements over six state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 55% and 63% reductions in RMSE and SAD, respectively. The framework maintains stable accuracy under low-SNR conditions, particularly for weak endmembers, establishing WS-Net as a robust and computationally efficient benchmark for weak-signal hyperspectral unmixing.

Deterministic Differentiable Structured Pruning for Large Language Models

Structured pruning reduces LLM inference cost by removing low-importance architectural components. This can be viewed as learning a multiplicative gate for each component under an l0 sparsity constraint. Due to the discreteness of the l0 norm, prior work typically adopts stochastic hard-concrete relaxations to enable differentiable optimization; however, this stochasticity can introduce a train--test mismatch when sampled masks are discretized for deployment and restricts masks to a bounded, near-binary range. To address this, we propose Deterministic Differentiable Pruning (DDP), a mask-only optimization method that eliminates stochasticity by directly optimizing a deterministic soft surrogate of the discrete l0 objective. Compared with prior approaches, DDP offers greater expressiveness, reduced train--test mismatch, and faster convergence. We apply our method to several dense and MoE models, including Qwen3-32B and Qwen3-30B-A3B, achieving a performance loss as small as 1% on downstream tasks while outperforming previous methods at 20% sparsity. We further demonstrate end-to-end inference speedups in realistic deployment settings with vLLM.

Preoperative-to-intraoperative Liver Registration for Laparoscopic Surgery via Latent-Grounded Correspondence Constraints

In laparoscopic liver surgery, augmented reality technology enhances intraoperative anatomical guidance by overlaying 3D liver models from preoperative CT/MRI onto laparoscopic 2D views. However, existing registration methods lack explicit modeling of reliable 2D-3D geometric correspondences supported by latent evidence, leading to limited interpretability and potentially unstable alignment in clinical scenarios. In this work, we introduce Land-Reg, a correspondence-driven deformable registration framework that explicitly learns latent-grounded 2D-3D landmark correspondences as an interpretable intermediate representation to bridge cross-modal alignment. For rigid registration, Land-Reg embraces a Cross-modal Latent Alignment module to map multi-modal features into a unified latent space. Further, an Uncertainty-enhanced Overlap Landmark Detector with similarity matching is proposed to robustly estimate explicit 2D-3D landmark correspondences. For non-rigid registration, we design a novel shape-constrained supervision strategy that anchors shape deformation to matched landmarks through reprojection consistency and incorporates local-isometric regularization to alleviate inherent 2D-3D depth ambiguity, while a rendered-mask alignment enforces global shape consistency. Experimental results on the P2ILF dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method on both rigid pose estimation and non-rigid deformation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/cuiruize/Land-Reg.

LLaDA-o: An Effective and Length-Adaptive Omni Diffusion Model

We present \textbf{LLaDA-o}, an effective and length-adaptive omni diffusion model for multimodal understanding and generation. LLaDA-o is built on a Mixture of Diffusion (MoD) framework that decouples discrete masked diffusion for text understanding and continuous diffusion for visual generation, while coupling them through a shared, simple, and efficient attention backbone that reduces redundant computation for fixed conditions. Building on MoD, we further introduce a data-centric length adaptation strategy that enables flexible-length decoding in multimodal settings without architectural changes. Extensive experiments show that LLaDA-o achieves state-of-the-art performance among omni-diffusion models on multimodal understanding and generation benchmarks, and reaches 87.04 on DPG-Bench for text-to-image generation, supporting the effectiveness of unified omni diffusion modeling. Code is available at https://github.com/ML-GSAI/LLaDA-o.

On Representation Redundancy in Large-Scale Instruction Tuning Data Selection

Data quality is a crucial factor in large language models training. While prior work has shown that models trained on smaller, high-quality datasets can outperform those trained on much larger but noisy or low-quality corpora, systematic methods for industrial-scale data selection in instruction tuning remain underexplored. In this work, we study instruction-tuning data selection through the lens of semantic representation similarity and identify a key limitation of state-of-the-art LLM encoders: they produce highly redundant semantic embeddings. To mitigate this redundancy, we propose Compressed Representation Data Selection (CRDS), a novel framework with two variants. CRDS-R applies Rademacher random projection followed by concatenation of transformer hidden-layer representations, while CRDS-W employs whitening-based dimensionality reduction to improve representational quality. Experimental results demonstrate that both variants substantially enhance data quality and consistently outperform state-of-the-art representation-based selection methods. Notably, CRDS-W achieves strong performance using only 3.5% of the data, surpassing the full-data baseline by an average of 0.71% across four datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/tdano1/CRDS.