S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

Closed-Loop Bidirectional Prompting for Adversarial Robustness of Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models adapt well to downstream tasks but are highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that disrupt cross-modal semantic alignment. Existing defenses are largely unidirectional or structural, failing to exploit bidirectional cross-modal complementarity and instance-wise adaptive protection. To overcome the limitations of unidirectional and static defenses in adversarial settings, we propose Closed-Loop Bidirectional Prompting, casting robust adaptation as cross-modal agreement recovery via a dynamic feedback loop on frozen encoders. A Semantic Anchor is introduced as a stable prior to constrain cyclic updates and mitigate perturbation-induced feature corruption. Through anchor-based bootstrapping, textual semantics denoise visual representations, while the refined visuals enable instance-adaptive prompt updating, yielding a rectified and robust consensus. Extensive evaluations across 11 datasets validate state-of-the-art robustness and strong base-to-new generalization, while maintaining a favorable trade-off between computational cost and accuracy.

MindAdapter: Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Residual Calibration of Cross-Subject Brain-to-Visual Decoding Models

Cross-subject brain-to-visual decoding remains a core challenge in brain-computer interfaces due to severe inter-individual variability that induces systematic subject-specific functional misalignment. To address this issue, we propose MindAdapter, a parameter-efficient few-shot calibration framework for pretrained brain-to-visual decoding models. MindAdapter adopts a decoupled linear-residual cascade alignment paradigm by freezing a pretrained explicit brain functional alignment backbone (coarse) and introducing a lightweight nonlinear residual adapter (fine), thereby disentangling global cross-subject correspondence from subject-specific residual corrections for fine-grained spatial and semantic calibration. To further preserve global representational stability, we design a topology-anchored dual-stream manifold constraint, where a small set of shared stimuli serves as topological pins with voxel-level paired supervision, while a semantic stream enforces consistency through a frozen vision-language decoder on unpaired brain data. Together, MindAdapter efficiently injects subject-specific corrections while maintaining the global representational geometry learned during pretraining. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) demonstrate that MindAdapter substantially improves cross-subject visual reconstruction and retrieval accuracy using only a few shared stimuli, offering a practical and data-efficient solution for personalized brain-to-visual decoding.

Meta-Soft: Leveraging Composable Meta-Tokens for Context-Preserving KV Cache Compression

The KV cache used in large language models has linearly growing time complexity, so LLMs face memory blow-up and reduced decoding efficiency when they process long contexts.Current KV Cache eviction has become an important research direction; however, existing methods based on fixed Soft Tokens (e.g., Judge Q) rely on a static parameter set as the query to evaluate the importance of KV pairs, so they cannot adapt dynamically to different input prompts, and they cannot precisely capture complex and changing task relevance.Also, evicted KV pairs are discarded permanently, so this causes irreversible information loss and context breaks. To address this problem, we propose Meta-Soft, a dynamic compression framework based on probe-driven context integration. Specifically, we build a meta-library with a learnable orthogonal basis matrix $\mathcal{L}$, and we use a selector network with Gumbel-Softmax to produce differentiable sparse combination weights, so we dynamically synthesize the most targeted $k$ Soft Tokens from the input prompt features.We append these Soft Tokens to the end of the input sequence to probe key information. We also introduce an attention-flow based integration mechanism, which redistributes the semantic information of removed tokens into retained tokens, and this keeps the dropped context information effectively.Experiments on multiple datasets show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art eviction methods and provides a new solution for KV Cache compression.

CLIF: Concept-Level Influence Functions for Transparent Bottleneck Models

In recent years, the black-box nature of deep learning models has limited their application in high-stakes domains such as medical diagnosis and finance, where interpretability is essential. To address this, we propose a novel approach using influence functions to enhance interpretability in NLP models at both the sample and concept levels. Experiments on CEBaB and Yelp datasets show that influence functions effectively identify the most impactful training samples, both helpful and harmful, on model predictions. By adjusting the labels and weights of these samples, we demonstrate that model performance can be restored to baseline levels without retraining, confirming the value of influence functions for efficient data debugging. Furthermore, our concept-level analysis identifies key concepts within Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) that significantly affect predictions. Modifying these concepts alters model behavior observably, providing clear insights into the decision process.

Joint sparse coding and temporal dynamics support context reconfiguration

Adaptive behavior requires the brain to transition between distinct contexts while maintaining representations of prior experience. The ability to reconfigure neural representations without erasing previously acquired knowledge is central to learning in dynamic environments, yet the neural mechanisms that support this balance remain unclear. Understanding these mechanisms is also critical for addressing catastrophic forgetting in artificial systems designed for lifelong learning. Here, we identify joint sparse coding and temporal dynamics in both the mouse medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and computational networks as mechanisms that help preserve prior representations during context transitions. Specifically, sparsity in context-dependent representations reduces cross-context interference, whereas temporal dynamics within the network activity further enhance context separability across time. Strikingly, networks endowed with both properties, such as spiking neural networks, exhibit improved retention during lifelong learning without auxiliary heuristics. These findings establish joint sparse coding and temporal dynamics as a core mechanism supporting flexible context reconfiguration in lifelong learning and, through their activity constraining nature, as an energy-efficient architectural principle for stable adaptation. Together, they provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how the brain preserves prior knowledge while flexibly adapting to new contexts.

Agri-CPJ: A Training-Free Explainable Framework for Agricultural Pest Diagnosis Using Caption-Prompt-Judge and LLM-as-a-Judge

Crop disease diagnosis from field photographs faces two recurring problems: models that score well on benchmarks frequently hallucinate species names, and when predictions are correct, the reasoning behind them is typically inaccessible to the practitioner. This paper describes Agri-CPJ (Caption-Prompt-Judge), a training-free few-shot framework in which a large vision-language model first generates a structured morphological caption, iteratively refined through multi-dimensional quality gating, before any diagnostic question is answered. Two candidate responses are then generated from complementary viewpoints, and an LLM judge selects the stronger one based on domain-specific criteria. Caption refinement is the component with the largest individual impact: ablations confirm that skipping it consistently degrades downstream accuracy across both models tested. On CDDMBench, pairing GPT-5-Nano with GPT-5-mini-generated captions yields \textbf{+22.7} pp in disease classification and \textbf{+19.5} points in QA score over no-caption baselines. Evaluated without modification on AgMMU-MCQs, GPT-5-Nano reached 77.84\% and Qwen-VL-Chat reached 64.54\%, placing them at or above most open-source models of comparable scale despite the format shift from open-ended to multiple-choice. The structured caption and judge rationale together constitute a readable audit trail: a practitioner who disagrees with a diagnosis can identify the specific caption observation that was incorrect. Code and data are publicly available https://github.com/CPJ-Agricultural/CPJ-Agricultural-Diagnosis

MorphSNN: Adaptive Graph Diffusion and Structural Plasticity for Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) currently face a critical bottleneck: while individual neurons exhibit dynamic biological properties, their macro-scopic architectures remain confined within conventional connectivity patterns that are static and hierarchical. This discrepancy between neuron-level dynamics and network-level fixed connectivity eliminates critical brain-like lateral interactions, limiting adaptability in changing environments. To address this, we propose MorphSNN, a backbone framework inspired by biological non-synaptic diffusion and structural plasticity. Specifically, we introduce a Graph Diffusion (GD)mechanism to facilitate efficient undirected signal propagation, complementing the feedforward hierarchy. Furthermore, it incorporates a Spatio-Temporal Structural Plasticity (STSP) mechanism, endowing the network with the capability for instance-specific, dynamic topological reorganization, thereby overcoming the limitations of fixed topologies. Experiments demonstrate that MorphSNN achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on static and neuromorphic datasets; for instance, it reaches 83.35% accuracy on N-Caltech101 with only 5 timesteps. More importantly, its self-evolving topology functions as an intrinsic distribution fingerprint, enabling superior Out-of- Distribution (OOD) detection without auxiliary training. The code is available at anonymous.4open.science/r/MorphSNN-B0BC.

MM-NeuroOnco: A Multimodal Benchmark and Instruction Dataset for MRI-Based Brain Tumor Diagnosis

Accurate brain tumor diagnosis requires models to not only detect lesions but also generate clinically interpretable reasoning grounded in imaging manifestations, yet existing public datasets remain limited in annotation richness and diagnostic semantics. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-NeuroOnco, a large-scale multimodal benchmark and instruction-tuning dataset for brain tumor MRI understanding, consisting of 24,726 MRI slices from 20 data sources paired with approximately 200,000 semantically enriched multimodal instructions spanning diverse tumor subtypes and imaging modalities. To mitigate the scarcity and high cost of diagnostic semantic annotations, we develop a multi-model collaborative pipeline for automated medical information completion and quality control, enabling the generation of diagnosis-related semantics beyond mask-only annotations. Building upon this dataset, we further construct MM-NeuroOnco-Bench, a manually annotated evaluation benchmark with a rejection-aware setting to reduce biases inherent in closed-ended question formats. Evaluation across ten representative models shows that even the strongest baseline, Gemini 3 Flash, achieves only 41.88% accuracy on diagnosis-related questions, highlighting the substantial challenges of multimodal brain tumor diagnostic understanding. Leveraging MM-NeuroOnco, we further propose NeuroOnco-GPT, which achieves a 27% absolute accuracy improvement on diagnostic questions following fine-tuning. This result demonstrates the effectiveness of our dataset and benchmark in advancing clinically grounded multimodal diagnostic reasoning. Code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/gfnnnb/MM-NeuroOnco

BMAM: Brain-inspired Multi-Agent Memory Framework

Language-model-based agents operating over extended interaction horizons face persistent challenges in preserving temporally grounded information and maintaining behavioral consistency across sessions, a failure mode we term soul erosion. We present BMAM (Brain-inspired Multi-Agent Memory), a general-purpose memory architecture that models agent memory as a set of functionally specialized subsystems rather than a single unstructured store. Inspired by cognitive memory systems, BMAM decomposes memory into episodic, semantic, salience-aware, and control-oriented components that operate at complementary time scales. To support long-horizon reasoning, BMAM organizes episodic memories along explicit timelines and retrieves evidence by fusing multiple complementary signals. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show that BMAM achieves 78.45 percent accuracy under the standard long-horizon evaluation setting, and ablation analyses confirm that the hippocampus-inspired episodic memory subsystem plays a critical role in temporal reasoning.