From Denoising to Decision Making: A Survey on Diffusion Model-Enabled Deep Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Networks

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has long been a promising solution for sequential resource management in wireless networks. However, conventional DRL methods are fundamentally limited by their reliance on unimodal policy distributions, inefficient exploration in high-dimensional action spaces, and poor adaptability to dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Meanwhile, diffusion models (DMs) as one of the most powerful families of generative AI have demonstrted remarkable capabilities in modeling complex, multi-modal data distributions across diverse domains. The integration of DMs and DRL has opened a new and rapidly growing research direction, in which DM-enabled policies substantially enhance decision quality by capturing the complex, discontinuous, and multimodal action structures inherent in wireless resource management. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of DM-enabled DRL algorithms and their applications for various issues in wireless networks. Particularly, we first provide the theoretical background of DM and present different DM-enabled DRL algorithms. We then systematically review applications of DM-enabled DRL for across computation offloading in mobile edge computing, UAV-assisted, vehicular, and AIGC-driven systems, as well as wireless resource allocation, physical-layer security, and robotics and UAV planning. We conclude the paper by higlight future research directions.

StepAudio 2.5 Technical Report

Unified audio-language modeling has emerged as a prominent trend in modern speech systems, promising to bring the reasoning capabilities of large language models to auditory tasks. However, existing unified foundations often struggle to match the depth of specialized systems across automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), and realtime spoken interaction. Bridging this gap remains an open challenge. This report presents StepAudio 2.5, a unified audio-language foundation model that matches or exceeds specialized systems across all three capabilities. Rather than treating these tasks as architecturally distinct, we operate on the premise that once text and audio share a multimodal representational space, task specialization becomes a matter of operational regimes: data construction, optimization targets, and decoding constraints. Guided by this insight, we advance the post-training paradigm from standard supervised learning to task-tailored Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), using it as the primary mechanism to define complex optimization targets. We leverage this RLHF-centric alignment, alongside specialized decoding, to shape a shared backbone into three distinct operational modes. Concretely, the ASR branch advances transcription efficiency via verifiable multi-token decoding; the TTS branch achieves controllable, expressive synthesis through preference-based RLHF and context-rich supervision; and the Realtime branch realizes low-latency, persona-consistent dialogue via generative reward modeling within an RLHF framework. On standard benchmarks, StepAudio 2.5 achieves state-of-the-art results across ASR, TTS, and Realtime, demonstrating that a singular audio-language foundation can successfully internalize the distinct deployment objectives of speech understanding, generation, and live interaction.

Unified Noise Steering for Efficient Human-Guided VLA Adaptation

Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as strong priors for robotic manipulation, yet adapting them to real-world distributions remains challenging. In particular, on-robot reinforcement learning (RL) is expensive and time-consuming, so effective adaptation depends on efficient policy improvement within a limited budget of real-world interactions. Noise-space RL lowers the cost by keeping the pretrained VLA fixed as a denoising generator while updating only a lightweight actor that predicts the noise. However, its performance is still limited due to inefficient autonomous exploration. Human corrective interventions can reduce this exploration burden, but they are naturally provided in action space, whereas noise-space finetuning requires supervision over noise variables. To address these challenges, we propose UniSteer, a Unified Noise Steering framework that combines human corrective guidance with noise-space RL through approximate action-to-noise inversion. Given a human corrective action, UniSteer inverts the frozen flow-matching decoder to recover a noise target, which provides supervised guidance for the same noise actor that is simultaneously optimized via reinforcement learning. Real-world experiments on diverse manipulation tasks show that UniSteer adapts more efficiently than strong noise-space RL and action-space human-in-the-loop baselines, improving the success rate from 20% to 90% in 66 minutes on average across four real-world adaptation tasks.

Score-Based Matching with Target Guidance for Cryo-EM Denoising

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) enables single-particle analysis of biological macromolecules under strict low-dose imaging conditions, but the resulting micrographs often exhibit extremely low signal-to-noise ratios and weak particle visibility. Image denoising is therefore an important preprocessing step for downstream cryo-EM analysis, including particle picking, 2D classification, and 3D reconstruction. Existing cryo-EM denoising methods are commonly trained with pixel-wise or Noise2Noise-style objectives, which can improve visual quality but do not explicitly account for structural consistency required by downstream analysis. In this work, we propose a score-based denoising framework for cryo-EM that learns the clean-data score to recover particle signals while better preserving structural information. Building on this formulation, we further introduce a target-guided variant that incorporates reference-density guidance to stabilize score learning under weak and ambiguous signal conditions. Rather than simply amplifying particle-like responses, our framework better suppresses structured low-frequency background, which improves particle--background separability for downstream analysis. Experiments on multiple cryo-EM datasets show that our score-based methods consistently improve downstream particle picking and produce more structure-consistent 3D reconstructions. Experiments on multiple cryo-EM datasets show that our methods improve downstream particle picking and produce more structure-consistent reconstructions.

MedOpenClaw: Auditable Medical Imaging Agents Reasoning over Uncurated Full Studies

Currently, evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) in medical imaging tasks oversimplifies clinical reality by relying on pre-selected 2D images that demand significant manual labor to curate. This setup misses the core challenge of realworld diagnostics: a true clinical agent must actively navigate full 3D volumes across multiple sequences or modalities to gather evidence and ultimately support a final decision. To address this, we propose MEDOPENCLAW, an auditable runtime designed to let VLMs operate dynamically within standard medical tools or viewers (e.g., 3D Slicer). On top of this runtime, we introduce MEDFLOWBENCH, a full-study medical imaging benchmark covering multi-sequence brain MRI and lung CT/PET. It systematically evaluates medical agentic capabilities across viewer-only, tool-use, and open-method tracks. Initial results reveal a critical insight: while state-of-the-art LLMs/VLMs (e.g., Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.4) can successfully navigate the viewer to solve basic study-level tasks, their performance paradoxically degrades when given access to professional support tools due to a lack of precise spatial grounding. By bridging the gap between static-image perception and interactive clinical workflows, MEDOPENCLAW and MEDFLOWBENCH establish a reproducible foundation for developing auditable, full-study medical imaging agents.

Mind the Rarities: Can Rare Skin Diseases Be Reliably Diagnosed via Diagnostic Reasoning?

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong performance in dermatology; however, evaluating diagnostic reasoning for rare conditions remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks focus on common diseases and assess only final accuracy, overlooking the clinical reasoning process, which is critical for complex cases. We address this gap by constructing DermCase, a long-context benchmark derived from peer-reviewed case reports. Our dataset contains 26,030 multi-modal image-text pairs and 6,354 clinically challenging cases, each annotated with comprehensive clinical information and step-by-step reasoning chains. To enable reliable evaluation, we establish DermLIP-based similarity metrics that achieve stronger alignment with dermatologists for assessing differential diagnosis quality. Benchmarking 22 leading LVLMs exposes significant deficiencies across diagnosis accuracy, differential diagnosis, and clinical reasoning. Fine-tuning experiments demonstrate that instruction tuning substantially improves performance while Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) yields minimal gains. Systematic error analysis further reveals critical limitations in current models' reasoning capabilities.

RASLF: Representation-Aware State Space Model for Light Field Super-Resolution

Current SSM-based light field super-resolution (LFSR) methods often fail to fully leverage the complementarity among various LF representations, leading to the loss of fine textures and geometric misalignments across views. To address these issues, we propose RASLF, a representation-aware state-space framework that explicitly models structural correlations across multiple LF representations. Specifically, a Progressive Geometric Refinement (PGR) block is created that uses a panoramic epipolar representation to explicitly encode multi-view parallax differences, thereby enabling integration across different LF representations. Furthermore, we introduce a Representation Aware Asymmetric Scanning (RAAS) mechanism that dynamically adjusts scanning paths based on the physical properties of different representation spaces, optimizing the balance between performance and efficiency through path pruning. Additionally, a Dual-Anchor Aggregation (DAA) module improves hierarchical feature flow, reducing redundant deeplayer features and prioritizing important reconstruction information. Experiments on various public benchmarks show that RASLF achieves the highest reconstruction accuracy while remaining highly computationally efficient.

Beyond Medical Diagnostics: How Medical Multimodal Large Language Models Think in Space

Visual spatial intelligence is critical for medical image interpretation, yet remains largely unexplored in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for 3D imaging. This gap persists due to a systemic lack of datasets featuring structured 3D spatial annotations beyond basic labels. In this study, we introduce an agentic pipeline that autonomously synthesizes spatial visual question-answering (VQA) data by orchestrating computational tools such as volume and distance calculators with multi-agent collaboration and expert radiologist validation. We present SpatialMed, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating 3D spatial intelligence in medical MLLMs, comprising nearly 10K question-answer pairs across multiple organs and tumor types. Our evaluations on 14 state-of-the-art MLLMs and extensive analyses reveal that current models lack robust spatial reasoning capabilities for medical imaging.

AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendation

LLM agents are rapidly becoming the practical interface for task automation, yet the ecosystem lacks a principled way to choose among an exploding space of deployable configurations. Existing LLM leaderboards and tool/agent benchmarks evaluate components in isolation and remain fragmented across tasks, metrics, and candidate pools, leaving a critical research gap: there is little query-conditioned supervision for learning to recommend end-to-end agent configurations that couple a backbone model with a toolkit. We address this gap with AgentSelect, a benchmark that reframes agent selection as narrative query-to-agent recommendation over capability profiles and systematically converts heterogeneous evaluation artifacts into unified, positive-only interaction data. AgentSelectcomprises 111,179 queries, 107,721 deployable agents, and 251,103 interaction records aggregated from 40+ sources, spanning LLM-only, toolkit-only, and compositional agents. Our analyses reveal a regime shift from dense head reuse to long-tail, near one-off supervision, where popularity-based CF/GNN methods become fragile and content-aware capability matching is essential. We further show that Part~III synthesized compositional interactions are learnable, induce capability-sensitive behavior under controlled counterfactual edits, and improve coverage over realistic compositions; models trained on AgentSelect also transfer to a public agent marketplace (MuleRun), yielding consistent gains on an unseen catalog. Overall, AgentSelect provides the first unified data and evaluation infrastructure for agent recommendation, which establishes a reproducible foundation to study and accelerate the emerging agent ecosystem.

Handling Supervision Scarcity in Chest X-ray Classification: Long-Tailed and Zero-Shot Learning

Chest X-ray (CXR) classification in clinical practice is often limited by imperfect supervision, arising from (i) extreme long-tailed multi-label disease distributions and (ii) missing annotations for rare or previously unseen findings. The CXR-LT 2026 challenge addresses these issues on a PadChest-based benchmark with a 36-class label space split into 30 in-distribution classes for training and 6 out-of-distribution (OOD) classes for zero-shot evaluation. We present task-specific solutions tailored to the distinct supervision regimes. For Task 1 (long-tailed multi-label classification), we adopt an imbalance-aware multi-label learning strategy to improve recognition of tail classes while maintaining stable performance on frequent findings. For Task 2 (zero-shot OOD recognition), we propose a prediction approach that produces scores for unseen disease categories without using any supervised labels or examples from the OOD classes during training. Evaluated with macro-averaged mean Average Precision (mAP), our method achieves strong performance on both tasks, ranking first on the public leaderboard of the development phase. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/hieuphamha19/CXR_LT.