Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China, School of Computing, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Abstract:In computational pathology, few-shot whole slide image classification is primarily driven by the extreme scarcity of expert-labeled slides. Recent vision-language methods incorporate textual semantics generated by large language models, but treat these descriptions as static class-level priors that are shared across all samples and lack sample-wise refinement. This limits both the diversity and precision of visual-semantic alignment, hindering generalization under limited supervision. To overcome this, we propose the stochastic MUlti-view Semantic Enhancement (MUSE), a framework that first refines semantic precision via sample-wise adaptation and then enhances semantic richness through retrieval-augmented multi-view generation. Specifically, MUSE introduces Sample-wise Fine-grained Semantic Enhancement (SFSE), which yields a fine-grained semantic prior for each sample through MoE-based adaptive visual-semantic interaction. Guided by this prior, Stochastic Multi-view Model Optimization (SMMO) constructs an LLM-generated knowledge base of diverse pathological descriptions per class, then retrieves and stochastically integrates multiple matched textual views during training. These dynamically selected texts serve as enriched semantic supervisions to stochastically optimize the vision-language model, promoting robustness and mitigating overfitting. Experiments on three benchmark WSI datasets show that MUSE consistently outperforms existing vision-language baselines in few-shot settings, demonstrating that effective few-shot pathology learning requires not only richer semantic sources but also their active and sample-aware semantic optimization. Our code is available at: https://github.com/JiahaoXu-god/CVPR2026_MUSE.
Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance by integrating powerful language backbones with large-scale visual encoders. Among these, latent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods enable implicit reasoning in continuous hidden states, facilitating seamless vision-language integration and faster inference. However, existing heuristically predefined supervision signals in latent CoT provide limited guidance for preserving critical visual information in intermediate latent states. To address this limitation, we propose CrystaL (Crystallized Latent Reasoning), a single-stage framework with two paths to process intact and corrupted images, respectively. By explicitly aligning the attention patterns and prediction distributions across the two paths, CrystaL crystallizes latent representations into task-relevant visual semantics, without relying on auxiliary annotations or external modules. Extensive experiments on perception-intensive benchmarks demonstrate that CrystaL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving substantial gains in fine-grained visual understanding while maintaining robust reasoning capabilities.
Abstract:Corneal Confocal Microscopy (CCM) is a sensitive tool for assessing small-fiber damage in Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy (DPN), yet the development of robust, automated deep learning-based diagnostic models is limited by scarce labelled data and fine-grained variability in corneal nerve morphology. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven foundation generative models excel at natural image synthesis, they often struggle in medical imaging due to limited domain-specific training, compromising the anatomical fidelity required for clinical analysis. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (WDLoRA)-based multimodal generative framework for clinically guided CCM image synthesis. WDLoRA is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) mechanism that decouples magnitude and directional weight updates, enabling foundation generative models to independently learn the orientation (nerve topology) and intensity (stromal contrast) required for medical realism. By jointly conditioning on nerve segmentation masks and disease-specific clinical prompts, the model synthesises anatomically coherent images across the DPN spectrum (Control, T1NoDPN, T1DPN). A comprehensive three-pillar evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art visual fidelity (Fréchet Inception Distance (FID): 5.18) and structural integrity (Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM): 0.630), significantly outperforming GAN and standard diffusion baselines. Crucially, the synthetic images preserve gold-standard clinical biomarkers and are statistically equivalent to real patient data. When used to train automated diagnostic models, the synthetic dataset improves downstream diagnostic accuracy by 2.1% and segmentation performance by 2.2%, validating the framework's potential to alleviate data bottlenecks in medical AI.
Abstract:The emergence of Self-Driving Laboratories (SDLs) transforms scientific discovery methodology by integrating AI with robotic automation to create closed-loop experimental systems capable of autonomous hypothesis generation, experimentation, and analysis. While promising to compress research timelines from years to weeks, their deployment introduces unprecedented safety challenges differing from traditional laboratories or purely digital AI. This paper presents Safe-SDL, a comprehensive framework for establishing robust safety boundaries and control mechanisms in AI-driven autonomous laboratories. We identify and analyze the critical ``Syntax-to-Safety Gap'' -- the disconnect between AI-generated syntactically correct commands and their physical safety implications -- as the central challenge in SDL deployment. Our framework addresses this gap through three synergistic components: (1) formally defined Operational Design Domains (ODDs) that constrain system behavior within mathematically verified boundaries, (2) Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) that provide real-time safety guarantees through continuous state-space monitoring, and (3) a novel Transactional Safety Protocol (CRUTD) that ensures atomic consistency between digital planning and physical execution. We ground our theoretical contributions through analysis of existing implementations including UniLabOS and the Osprey architecture, demonstrating how these systems instantiate key safety principles. Evaluation against the LabSafety Bench reveals that current foundation models exhibit significant safety failures, demonstrating that architectural safety mechanisms are essential rather than optional. Our framework provides both theoretical foundations and practical implementation guidance for safe deployment of autonomous scientific systems, establishing the groundwork for responsible acceleration of AI-driven discovery.
Abstract:Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are often considered a natural fit for continual learning because sparse routing should localize updates and reduce interference, yet MoE Transformers still forget substantially even with sparse, well-balanced expert utilization. We attribute this gap to a pre-routing bottleneck: multi-head attention concatenates head-specific signals into a single post-attention router input, forcing routing to act on co-occurring feature compositions rather than separable head channels. We show that this router input simultaneously encodes multiple separately decodable semantic and structural factors with uneven head support, and that different feature compositions induce weakly aligned parameter-gradient directions; as a result, routing maps many distinct compositions to the same route. We quantify this collision effect via a route-wise effective composition number $N_{eff}$ and find that higher $N_{eff}$ is associated with larger old-task loss increases after continual training. Motivated by these findings, we propose MH-MoE, which performs head-wise routing over sub-representations to increase routing granularity and reduce composition collisions. On TRACE with Qwen3-0.6B/8B, MH-MoE effectively mitigates forgetting, reducing BWT on Qwen3-0.6B from 11.2% (LoRAMoE) to 4.5%.
Abstract:Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale Large Language Models via expert specialization induced by conditional computation. In practice, however, expert specialization often fails: some experts become functionally similar, while others functioning as de facto shared experts, limiting the effective capacity and model performance. In this work, we analysis from a spectral perspective on parameter and gradient spaces, uncover that (1) experts share highly overlapping dominant spectral components in their parameters, (2) dominant gradient subspaces are strongly aligned across experts, driven by ubiquitous low-rank structure in human corpus, and (3) gating mechanisms preferentially route inputs along these dominant directions, further limiting specialization. To address this, we propose Spectral-Decoupled MoE (SD-MoE), which decomposes both parameter and gradient in the spectral space. SD-MoE improves performance across downstream tasks, enables effective expert specialization, incurring minimal additional computation, and can be seamlessly integrated into a wide range of existing MoE architectures, including Qwen and DeepSeek.
Abstract:Given that Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to automate software development, comprehensive software assurance spans three distinct goals: regression prevention, reactive reproduction, and proactive discovery. Current evaluations systematically overlook the third goal. Specifically, they either treat existing code as ground truth (a compliance trap) for regression prevention, or depend on post-failure artifacts (e.g., issue reports) for bug reproduction-so they rarely surface defects before failures. To bridge this gap, we present TestExplora, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs as proactive testers within full-scale, realistic repository environments. TestExplora contains 2,389 tasks from 482 repositories and hides all defect-related signals. Models must proactively find bugs by comparing implementations against documentation-derived intent, using documentation as the oracle. Furthermore, to keep evaluation sustainable and reduce leakage, we propose continuous, time-aware data collection. Our evaluation reveals a significant capability gap: state-of-the-art models achieve a maximum Fail-to-Pass (F2P) rate of only 16.06%. Further analysis indicates that navigating complex cross-module interactions and leveraging agentic exploration are critical to advancing LLMs toward autonomous software quality assurance. Consistent with this, SWEAgent instantiated with GPT-5-mini achieves an F2P of 17.27% and an F2P@5 of 29.7%, highlighting the effectiveness and promise of agentic exploration in proactive bug discovery tasks.
Abstract:While world models have emerged as a cornerstone of embodied intelligence by enabling agents to reason about environmental dynamics through action-conditioned prediction, their evaluation remains fragmented. Current evaluation of embodied world models has largely focused on perceptual fidelity (e.g., video generation quality), overlooking the functional utility of these models in downstream decision-making tasks. In this work, we introduce WorldArena, a unified benchmark designed to systematically evaluate embodied world models across both perceptual and functional dimensions. WorldArena assesses models through three dimensions: video perception quality, measured with 16 metrics across six sub-dimensions; embodied task functionality, which evaluates world models as data engines, policy evaluators, and action planners integrating with subjective human evaluation. Furthermore, we propose EWMScore, a holistic metric integrating multi-dimensional performance into a single interpretable index. Through extensive experiments on 14 representative models, we reveal a significant perception-functionality gap, showing that high visual quality does not necessarily translate into strong embodied task capability. WorldArena benchmark with the public leaderboard is released at https://worldarena.ai, providing a framework for tracking progress toward truly functional world models in embodied AI.
Abstract:Memory mechanism is a core component of LLM-based agents, enabling reasoning and knowledge discovery over long-horizon contexts. Existing agent memory systems are typically designed within isolated paradigms (e.g., explicit, parametric, or latent memory) with tightly coupled retrieval methods that hinder cross-paradigm generalization and fusion. In this work, we take a first step toward unifying heterogeneous memory paradigms within a single memory system. We propose MemAdapter, a memory retrieval framework that enables fast alignment across agent memory paradigms. MemAdapter adopts a two-stage training strategy: (1) training a generative subgraph retriever from the unified memory space, and (2) adapting the retriever to unseen memory paradigms by training a lightweight alignment module through contrastive learning. This design improves the flexibility for memory retrieval and substantially reduces alignment cost across paradigms. Comprehensive experiments on three public evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that the generative subgraph retriever consistently outperforms five strong agent memory systems across three memory paradigms and agent model scales. Notably, MemAdapter completes cross-paradigm alignment within 13 minutes on a single GPU, achieving superior performance over original memory retrievers with less than 5% of training compute. Furthermore, MemAdapter enables effective zero-shot fusion across memory paradigms, highlighting its potential as a plug-and-play solution for agent memory systems.
Abstract:As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to handle massive context windows, achieving surgical feature-level interpretation is essential for high-stakes tasks like legal auditing and code debugging. However, existing local model-agnostic explanation methods face a critical dilemma in these scenarios: feature-based methods suffer from attribution dilution due to high feature dimensionality, thus failing to provide faithful explanations. In this paper, we propose Focus-LIME, a coarse-to-fine framework designed to restore the tractability of surgical interpretation. Focus-LIME utilizes a proxy model to curate the perturbation neighborhood, allowing the target model to perform fine-grained attribution exclusively within the optimized context. Empirical evaluations on long-context benchmarks demonstrate that our method makes surgical explanations practicable and provides faithful explanations to users.