EvoTok: A Unified Image Tokenizer via Residual Latent Evolution for Visual Understanding and Generation

The development of unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is fundamentally challenged by the granularity gap between visual understanding and generation: understanding requires high-level semantic abstractions, while image generation demands fine-grained pixel-level representations. Existing approaches usually enforce the two supervision on the same set of representation or decouple these two supervision on separate feature spaces, leading to interference and inconsistency, respectively. In this work, we propose EvoTok, a unified image tokenizer that reconciles these requirements through a residual evolution process within a shared latent space. Instead of maintaining separate token spaces for pixels and semantics, EvoTok encodes an image into a cascaded sequence of residual tokens via residual vector quantization. This residual sequence forms an evolution trajectory where earlier stages capture low-level details and deeper stages progressively transition toward high-level semantic representations. Despite being trained on a relatively modest dataset of 13M images, far smaller than the billion-scale datasets used by many previous unified tokenizers, EvoTok achieves a strong reconstruction quality of 0.43 rFID on ImageNet-1K at 256x256 resolution. When integrated with a large language model, EvoTok shows promising performance across 7 out of 9 visual understanding benchmarks, and remarkable results on image generation benchmarks such as GenEval and GenAI-Bench. These results demonstrate that modeling visual representations as an evolving trajectory provides an effective and principled solution for unifying visual understanding and generation.

EvoTool: Self-Evolving Tool-Use Policy Optimization in LLM Agents via Blame-Aware Mutation and Diversity-Aware Selection

LLM-based agents depend on effective tool-use policies to solve complex tasks, yet optimizing these policies remains challenging due to delayed supervision and the difficulty of credit assignment in long-horizon trajectories. Existing optimization approaches tend to be either monolithic, which are prone to entangling behaviors, or single-aspect, which ignore cross-module error propagation. To address these limitations, we propose EvoTool, a self-evolving framework that optimizes a modular tool-use policy via a gradient-free evolutionary paradigm. EvoTool decomposes agent's tool-use policy into four modules, including Planner, Selector, Caller, and Synthesizer, and iteratively improves them in a self-improving loop through three novel mechanisms. Trajectory-Grounded Blame Attribution uses diagnostic traces to localize failures to a specific module. Feedback-Guided Targeted Mutation then edits only that module via natural-language critique. Diversity-Aware Population Selection preserves complementary candidates to ensure solution diversity. Across four benchmarks, EvoTool outperforms strong baselines by over 5 points on both GPT-4.1 and Qwen3-8B, while achieving superior efficiency and transferability. The code will be released once paper is accepted.

ShipTraj-R1: Reinforcing Ship Trajectory Prediction in Large Language Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

Recent advancements in reinforcement fine-tuning have significantly improved the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). In particular, methods such as group relative policy optimization (GRPO) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various fields. However, applying LLMs to ship trajectory prediction remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose ShipTraj-R1, a novel LLM-based framework that reformulates ship trajectory prediction as a text-to-text generation problem. (1) We design a dynamic prompt containing trajectory information about conflicting ships to guide the model to achieve adaptive chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. (2) We introduce a comprehensive rule-based reward mechanism to incentivize the reasoning format and prediction accuracy of the model. (3) Our ShipTraj-R1 is reinforced through the GRPO mechanism guided by domain-specific prompts and rewards, and utilizes the Qwen3 as the model backbone. Extensive experimental results on two complex and real-world maritime datasets show that the proposed ShipTraj-R1 achieves the least error compared with state-of-the-art deep learning and LLM-based baselines.

UniWeTok: An Unified Binary Tokenizer with Codebook Size $\mathit{2^{128}}$ for Unified Multimodal Large Language Model

Unified Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) require a visual representation that simultaneously supports high-fidelity reconstruction, complex semantic extraction, and generative suitability. However, existing visual tokenizers typically struggle to satisfy these conflicting objectives within a single framework. In this paper, we introduce UniWeTok, a unified discrete tokenizer designed to bridge this gap using a massive binary codebook ($\mathit{2^{128}}$). For training framework, we introduce Pre-Post Distillation and a Generative-Aware Prior to enhance the semantic extraction and generative prior of the discrete tokens. In terms of model architecture, we propose a convolution-attention hybrid architecture with the SigLu activation function. SigLu activation not only bounds the encoder output and stabilizes the semantic distillation process but also effectively addresses the optimization conflict between token entropy loss and commitment loss. We further propose a three-stage training framework designed to enhance UniWeTok's adaptability cross various image resolutions and perception-sensitive scenarios, such as those involving human faces and textual content. On ImageNet, UniWeTok achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance (FID: UniWeTok 1.38 vs. REPA 1.42) while requiring a remarkably low training compute (Training Tokens: UniWeTok 33B vs. REPA 262B). On general-domain, UniWeTok demonstrates highly competitive capabilities across a broad range of tasks, including multimodal understanding, image generation (DPG Score: UniWeTok 86.63 vs. FLUX.1 [Dev] 83.84), and editing (GEdit Overall Score: UniWeTok 5.09 vs. OmniGen 5.06). We release code and models to facilitate community exploration of unified tokenizer and MLLM.

StomataSeg: Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation for Sorghum Stomatal Components

Sorghum is a globally important cereal grown widely in water-limited and stress-prone regions. Its strong drought tolerance makes it a priority crop for climate-resilient agriculture. Improving water-use efficiency in sorghum requires precise characterisation of stomatal traits, as stomata control of gas exchange, transpiration and photosynthesis have a major influence on crop performance. Automated analysis of sorghum stomata is difficult because the stomata are small (often less than 40 $μ$m in length in grasses such as sorghum) and vary in shape across genotypes and leaf surfaces. Automated segmentation contributes to high-throughput stomatal phenotyping, yet current methods still face challenges related to nested small structures and annotation bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised instance segmentation framework tailored for analysis of sorghum stomatal components. We collect and annotate a sorghum leaf imagery dataset containing 11,060 human-annotated patches, covering the three stomatal components (pore, guard cell and complex area) across multiple genotypes and leaf surfaces. To improve the detection of tiny structures, we split high-resolution microscopy images into overlapping small patches. We then apply a pseudo-labelling strategy to unannotated images, producing an additional 56,428 pseudo-labelled patches. Benchmarking across semantic and instance segmentation models shows substantial performance gains: for semantic models the top mIoU increases from 65.93% to 70.35%, whereas for instance models the top AP rises from 28.30% to 46.10%. These results demonstrate that combining patch-based preprocessing with semi-supervised learning significantly improves the segmentation of fine stomatal structures. The proposed framework supports scalable extraction of stomatal traits and facilitates broader adoption of AI-driven phenotyping in crop science.

Non-volatile Programmable Photonic Integrated Circuits using Mechanically Latched MEMS: A System-Level Scheme Enabling Power-Connection-Free Operation Without Performance Compromise

Programmable photonic integrated circuits (PPICs) offer a versatile platform for implementing diverse optical functions on a generic hardware mesh. However, the scalability of PPICs faces critical power consumption barriers. Therefore, we propose a novel non-volatile PPIC architecture utilizing MEMS with mechanical latching, enabling stable passive operation without any power connection once configured. To ensure practical applicability, we present a system-level solution including both this hardware innovation and an accompanying automatic error-resilient configuration algorithm. The algorithm compensates for the lack of continuous tunability inherent in the non-volatile hardware design, thereby enabling such new operational paradigm without compromising performance, and also ensuring robustness against fabrication errors. Functional simulations were performed to validate the proposed scheme by configuring five distinct functionalities of varying complexity, including a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), a MZI lattice filter, a ring resonator (ORR), a double ORR ring-loaded MZI, and a triple ORR coupled resonator waveguide filter. The results demonstrate that our non-volatile scheme achieves performance equivalent to conventional PPICs. Robustness analysis was also conducted, and the results demonstrated that our scheme exhibits strong robustness against various fabrication errors. Furthermore, we explored the trade-off between the hardware design complexity of such non-volatile scheme and its performance. This study establishes a viable pathway to a new generation of power-connection-free PPICs, providing a practical and scalable solution for future photonic systems.

From Evidence-Based Medicine to Knowledge Graph: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Sports Rehabilitation and a Domain Benchmark

In medicine, large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground outputs in up-to-date external evidence. However, current RAG approaches focus primarily on performance improvements while overlooking evidence-based medicine (EBM) principles. This study addresses two key gaps: (1) the lack of PICO alignment between queries and retrieved evidence, and (2) the absence of evidence hierarchy considerations during reranking. We present a generalizable strategy for adapting EBM to graph-based RAG, integrating the PICO framework into knowledge graph construction and retrieval, and proposing a Bayesian-inspired reranking algorithm to calibrate ranking scores by evidence grade without introducing predefined weights. We validated this framework in sports rehabilitation, a literature-rich domain currently lacking RAG systems and benchmarks. We released a knowledge graph (357,844 nodes and 371,226 edges) and a reusable benchmark of 1,637 QA pairs. The system achieved 0.830 nugget coverage, 0.819 answer faithfulness, 0.882 semantic similarity, and 0.788 PICOT match accuracy. In a 5-point Likert evaluation, five expert clinicians rated the system 4.66-4.84 across factual accuracy, faithfulness, relevance, safety, and PICO alignment. These findings demonstrate that the proposed EBM adaptation strategy improves retrieval and answer quality and is transferable to other clinical domains. The released resources also help address the scarcity of RAG datasets in sports rehabilitation.

Heteroscedastic Bayesian Optimization-Based Dynamic PID Tuning for Accurate and Robust UAV Trajectory Tracking

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play an important role in various applications, where precise trajectory tracking is crucial. However, conventional control algorithms for trajectory tracking often exhibit limited performance due to the underactuated, nonlinear, and highly coupled dynamics of quadrotor systems. To address these challenges, we propose HBO-PID, a novel control algorithm that integrates the Heteroscedastic Bayesian Optimization (HBO) framework with the classical PID controller to achieve accurate and robust trajectory tracking. By explicitly modeling input-dependent noise variance, the proposed method can better adapt to dynamic and complex environments, and therefore improve the accuracy and robustness of trajectory tracking. To accelerate the convergence of optimization, we adopt a two-stage optimization strategy that allow us to more efficiently find the optimal controller parameters. Through experiments in both simulation and real-world scenarios, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Compared to SOTA methods, it improves the position accuracy by 24.7% to 42.9%, and the angular accuracy by 40.9% to 78.4%.

Enabling Ultra-Fast Cardiovascular Imaging Across Heterogeneous Clinical Environments with a Generalist Foundation Model and Multimodal Database

Multimodal cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging provides comprehensive and non-invasive insights into cardiovascular disease (CVD) diagnosis and underlying mechanisms. Despite decades of advancements, its widespread clinical adoption remains constrained by prolonged scan times and heterogeneity across medical environments. This underscores the urgent need for a generalist reconstruction foundation model for ultra-fast CMR imaging, one capable of adapting across diverse imaging scenarios and serving as the essential substrate for all downstream analyses. To enable this goal, we curate MMCMR-427K, the largest and most comprehensive multimodal CMR k-space database to date, comprising 427,465 multi-coil k-space data paired with structured metadata across 13 international centers, 12 CMR modalities, 15 scanners, and 17 CVD categories in populations across three continents. Building on this unprecedented resource, we introduce CardioMM, a generalist reconstruction foundation model capable of dynamically adapting to heterogeneous fast CMR imaging scenarios. CardioMM unifies semantic contextual understanding with physics-informed data consistency to deliver robust reconstructions across varied scanners, protocols, and patient presentations. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that CardioMM achieves state-of-the-art performance in the internal centers and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen external settings. Even at imaging acceleration up to 24x, CardioMM reliably preserves key cardiac phenotypes, quantitative myocardial biomarkers, and diagnostic image quality, enabling a substantial increase in CMR examination throughput without compromising clinical integrity. Together, our open-access MMCMR-427K database and CardioMM framework establish a scalable pathway toward high-throughput, high-quality, and clinically accessible cardiovascular imaging.

Kling-Omni Technical Report

We present Kling-Omni, a generalist generative framework designed to synthesize high-fidelity videos directly from multimodal visual language inputs. Adopting an end-to-end perspective, Kling-Omni bridges the functional separation among diverse video generation, editing, and intelligent reasoning tasks, integrating them into a holistic system. Unlike disjointed pipeline approaches, Kling-Omni supports a diverse range of user inputs, including text instructions, reference images, and video contexts, processing them into a unified multimodal representation to deliver cinematic-quality and highly-intelligent video content creation. To support these capabilities, we constructed a comprehensive data system that serves as the foundation for multimodal video creation. The framework is further empowered by efficient large-scale pre-training strategies and infrastructure optimizations for inference. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that Kling-Omni demonstrates exceptional capabilities in in-context generation, reasoning-based editing, and multimodal instruction following. Moving beyond a content creation tool, we believe Kling-Omni is a pivotal advancement toward multimodal world simulators capable of perceiving, reasoning, generating and interacting with the dynamic and complex worlds.