Where Did It Go Wrong? Capability-Oriented Failure Attribution for Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents

Embodied agents in safety-critical applications such as Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) rely on multiple interdependent capabilities (e.g., perception, memory, planning, decision), making failures difficult to localize and attribute. Existing testing methods are largely system-level and provide limited insight into which capability deficiencies cause task failures. We propose a capability-oriented testing approach that enables failure detection and attribution by combining (1) adaptive test case generation via seed selection and mutation, (2) capability oracles for identifying capability-specific errors, and (3) a feedback mechanism that attributes failures to capabilities and guides further test generation. Experiments show that our method discovers more failure cases and more accurately pinpoints capability-level deficiencies than state-of-the-art baselines, providing more interpretable and actionable guidance for improving embodied agents.

Compact single-shot ranging and near-far imaging using metasurfaces

We present a metasurface imaging system capable of simultaneously capturing two images at close range (1-2~cm) and an additional image at long range (about 40~cm) on a shared photosensor. The close-range image pair focuses at 1.4~cm and 2.0~cm, respectively, which forms a focal stack, enabling passive ranging with an accuracy of $\pm$1~mm from 12~mm to 20~mm through a computationally efficient depth-from-defocus algorithm for a simplified scenario. The entire system is compact, with a total track length of 15~mm, making it suitable for seamless integration into edge platforms for defense and other resource-constrained applications.

DSH-Bench: A Difficulty- and Scenario-Aware Benchmark with Hierarchical Subject Taxonomy for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

Significant progress has been achieved in subject-driven text-to-image (T2I) generation, which aims to synthesize new images depicting target subjects according to user instructions. However, evaluating these models remains a significant challenge. Existing benchmarks exhibit critical limitations: 1) insufficient diversity and comprehensiveness in subject images, 2) inadequate granularity in assessing model performance across different subject difficulty levels and prompt scenarios, and 3) a profound lack of actionable insights and diagnostic guidance for subsequent model refinement. To address these limitations, we propose DSH-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that enables systematic multi-perspective analysis of subject-driven T2I models through four principal innovations: 1) a hierarchical taxonomy sampling mechanism ensuring comprehensive subject representation across 58 fine-grained categories, 2) an innovative classification scheme categorizing both subject difficulty level and prompt scenario for granular capability assessment, 3) a novel Subject Identity Consistency Score (SICS) metric demonstrating a 9.4\% higher correlation with human evaluation compared to existing measures in quantifying subject preservation, and 4) a comprehensive set of diagnostic insights derived from the benchmark, offering critical guidance for optimizing future model training paradigms and data construction strategies. Through an extensive empirical evaluation of 19 leading models, DSH-Bench uncovers previously obscured limitations in current approaches, establishing concrete directions for future research and development.

InstMeter: An Instruction-Level Method to Predict Energy and Latency of DL Model Inference on MCUs

Deep learning (DL) models can now run on microcontrollers (MCUs). Through neural architecture search (NAS), we can search DL models that meet the constraints of MCUs. Among various constraints, energy and latency costs of the model inference are critical metrics. To predict them, existing research relies on coarse proxies such as multiply-accumulations (MACs) and model's input parameters, often resulting in inaccurate predictions or requiring extensive data collection. In this paper, we propose InstMeter, a predictor leveraging MCUs' clock cycles to accurately estimate the energy and latency of DL models. Clock cycles are fundamental metrics reflecting MCU operations, directly determining energy and latency costs. Furthermore, a unique property of our predictor is its strong linearity, allowing it to be simple and accurate. We thoroughly evaluate InstMeter under different scenarios, MCUs, and software settings. Compared with state-of-the-art studies, InstMeter can reduce the energy and latency prediction errors by $3\times$ and $6.5\times$, respectively, while requiring $100\times$ and $10\times$ less training data. In the NAS scenario, InstMeter can fully exploit the energy budget, identifying optimal DL models with higher inference accuracy. We also evaluate InstMeter's generalization performance through various experiments on three ARM MCUs (Cortex-M4, M7, M33) and one RISC-V-based MCU (ESP32-C3), different compilation options (-Os, -O2), GCC versions (v7.3, v10.3), application scenarios (keyword spotting, image recognition), dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, temperatures (21°C, 43°C), and software settings (TFLMv2.4, TFLMvCI). We will open our source codes and the MCU-specific benchmark datasets.

ScreenAnt: Transparent On-Screen Antennas for 6G

6G will require on-device antenna systems to operate at ultra-high frequency bands, achieve robust beamforming on the compact user devices, and be blockage-robust. Conventional edge-mounted antennas on devices have limited apertures, suffer from the 'death grip' caused by user-induced blockage, and have poor scalability at mmWave and sub-THz bands. To address these issues, motivated by the rapid evolution of transparent materials and antennas, we propose ScreenAnt in this work--which integrates a transparent antenna array onto the screens of future mobile devices. Specifically, we propose using a transparent on-screen uniform planar array and develop a framework to model its electromagnetic property, spatial configuration, and blockage robustness under realistic user-induced blockage. We also design a gradient-ascent-based algorithm to efficiently optimize power and phase control of on-screen antennas to maximize ScreenAnt's spectral efficiency. Our thorough simulations show that the proposed ScreenAnt can increase the uplink spectral efficiency by over 50% compared to edge-mounted antennas at 28 GHz, and by more than 150% at 300 GHz. ScreenAnt also demonstrates strong robustness against user-induced blockage, paving the way for practical and high-capacity 6G user device designs.

From Flat Logs to Causal Graphs: Hierarchical Failure Attribution for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-powered Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains but suffer from inherent fragility and opaque failure mechanisms. Existing failure attribution methods, whether relying on direct prompting, costly replays, or supervised fine-tuning, typically treat execution logs as flat sequences. This linear perspective fails to disentangle the intricate causal links inherent to MAS, leading to weak observability and ambiguous responsibility boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose CHIEF, a novel framework that transforms chaotic trajectories into a structured hierarchical causal graph. It then employs hierarchical oracle-guided backtracking to efficiently prune the search space via sybthesized virtual oracles. Finally, it implements counterfactual attribution via a progressive causal screening strategy to rigorously distinguish true root causes from propagated symptoms. Experiments on Who&When benchmark show that CHIEF outperforms eight strong and state-of-the-art baselines on both agent- and step-level accuracy. Ablation studies further confirm the critical role of each proposed module.

MTFM: A Scalable and Alignment-free Foundation Model for Industrial Recommendation in Meituan

Industrial recommendation systems typically involve multiple scenarios, yet existing cross-domain (CDR) and multi-scenario (MSR) methods often require prohibitive resources and strict input alignment, limiting their extensibility. We propose MTFM (Meituan Foundation Model for Recommendation), a transformer-based framework that addresses these challenges. Instead of pre-aligning inputs, MTFM transforms cross-domain data into heterogeneous tokens, capturing multi-scenario knowledge in an alignment-free manner. To enhance efficiency, we first introduce a multi-scenario user-level sample aggregation that significantly enhances training throughput by reducing the total number of instances. We further integrate Grouped-Query Attention and a customized Hybrid Target Attention to minimize memory usage and computational complexity. Furthermore, we implement various system-level optimizations, such as kernel fusion and the elimination of CPU-GPU blocking, to further enhance both training and inference throughput. Offline and online experiments validate the effectiveness of MTFM, demonstrating that significant performance gains are achieved by scaling both model capacity and multi-scenario training data.

GPO: Growing Policy Optimization for Legged Robot Locomotion and Whole-Body Control

Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies for legged robots remains challenging due to high-dimensional continuous actions, hardware constraints, and limited exploration. Existing methods for locomotion and whole-body control work well for position-based control with environment-specific heuristics (e.g., reward shaping, curriculum design, and manual initialization), but are less effective for torque-based control, where sufficiently exploring the action space and obtaining informative gradient signals for training is significantly more difficult. We introduce Growing Policy Optimization (GPO), a training framework that applies a time-varying action transformation to restrict the effective action space in the early stage, thereby encouraging more effective data collection and policy learning, and then progressively expands it to enhance exploration and achieve higher expected return. We prove that this transformation preserves the PPO update rule and introduces only bounded, vanishing gradient distortion, thereby ensuring stable training. We evaluate GPO on both quadruped and hexapod robots, including zero-shot deployment of simulation-trained policies on hardware. Policies trained with GPO consistently achieve better performance. These results suggest that GPO provides a general, environment-agnostic optimization framework for learning legged locomotion.

Frame-Guided Synthetic Claim Generation for Automatic Fact-Checking Using High-Volume Tabular Data

Automated fact-checking benchmarks have largely ignored the challenge of verifying claims against real-world, high-volume structured data, instead focusing on small, curated tables. We introduce a new large-scale, multilingual dataset to address this critical gap. It contains 78,503 synthetic claims grounded in 434 complex OECD tables, which average over 500K rows each. We propose a novel, frame-guided methodology where algorithms programmatically select significant data points based on six semantic frames to generate realistic claims in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Hindi. Crucially, we demonstrate through knowledge-probing experiments that LLMs have not memorized these facts, forcing systems to perform genuine retrieval and reasoning rather than relying on parameterized knowledge. We provide a baseline SQL-generation system and show that our benchmark is highly challenging. Our analysis identifies evidence retrieval as the primary bottleneck, with models struggling to find the correct data in massive tables. This dataset provides a critical new resource for advancing research on this unsolved, real-world problem.

All Changes May Have Invariant Principles: Improving Ever-Shifting Harmful Meme Detection via Design Concept Reproduction

Harmful memes are ever-shifting in the Internet communities, which are difficult to analyze due to their type-shifting and temporal-evolving nature. Although these memes are shifting, we find that different memes may share invariant principles, i.e., the underlying design concept of malicious users, which can help us analyze why these memes are harmful. In this paper, we propose RepMD, an ever-shifting harmful meme detection method based on the design concept reproduction. We first refer to the attack tree to define the Design Concept Graph (DCG), which describes steps that people may take to design a harmful meme. Then, we derive the DCG from historical memes with design step reproduction and graph pruning. Finally, we use DCG to guide the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to detect harmful memes. The evaluation results show that RepMD achieves the highest accuracy with 81.1% and has slight accuracy decreases when generalized to type-shifting and temporal-evolving memes. Human evaluation shows that RepMD can improve the efficiency of human discovery on harmful memes, with 15$\sim$30 seconds per meme.