PDMP: Rethinking Balanced Multimodal Learning via Performance-Dominant Modality Prioritization

Multimodal learning has attracted increasing attention due to its practicality. However, it often suffers from insufficient optimization, where the multimodal model underperforms even compared to its unimodal counterparts. Existing methods attribute this problem to the imbalanced learning between modalities and solve it by gradient modulation. This paper argues that balanced learning is not the optimal setting for multimodal learning. On the contrary, imbalanced learning driven by the performance-dominant modality that has superior unimodal performance can contribute to better multimodal performance. And the under-optimization problem is caused by insufficient learning of the performance-dominant modality. To this end, we propose the Performance-Dominant Modality Prioritization (PDMP) strategy to assist multimodal learning. Specifically, PDMP firstly mines the performance-dominant modality via the performance ranking of the independently trained unimodal model. Then PDMP introduces asymmetric coefficients to modulate the gradients of each modality, enabling the performance-dominant modality to dominate the optimization. Since PDMP only relies on the unimodal performance ranking, it is independent of the structures and fusion methods of the multimodal model and has great potential for practical scenarios. Finally, extensive experiments on various datasets validate the superiority of PDMP.

3DCity-LLM: Empowering Multi-modality Large Language Models for 3D City-scale Perception and Understanding

While multi-modality large language models excel in object-centric or indoor scenarios, scaling them to 3D city-scale environments remains a formidable challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose 3DCity-LLM, a unified framework designed for 3D city-scale vision-language perception and understanding. 3DCity-LLM employs a coarse-to-fine feature encoding strategy comprising three parallel branches for target object, inter-object relationship, and global scene. To facilitate large-scale training, we introduce 3DCity-LLM-1.2M dataset that comprises approximately 1.2 million high-quality samples across seven representative task categories, ranging from fine-grained object analysis to multi-faceted scene planning. This strictly quality-controlled dataset integrates explicit 3D numerical information and diverse user-oriented simulations, enriching the question-answering diversity and realism of urban scenarios. Furthermore, we apply a multi-dimensional protocol based on text-similarity metrics and LLM-based semantic assessment to ensure faithful and comprehensive evaluations for all methods. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that 3DCity-LLM significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, offering a promising and meaningful direction for advancing spatial reasoning and urban intelligence. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SYSU-3DSTAILab/3D-City-LLM.

Joint Optimization of Storage and Loading for High-Performance 3D Point Cloud Data Processing

With the rapid development of computer vision and deep learning, significant advancements have been made in 3D vision, partic- ularly in autonomous driving, robotic perception, and augmented reality. 3D point cloud data, as a crucial representation of 3D information, has gained widespread attention. However, the vast scale and complexity of point cloud data present significant chal- lenges for loading and processing and traditional algorithms struggle to handle large-scale datasets.The diversity of storage formats for point cloud datasets (e.g., PLY, XYZ, BIN) adds complexity to data handling and results in inefficiencies in data preparation. Al- though binary formats like BIN and NPY have been used to speed up data access, they still do not fully address the time-consuming data loading and processing phase. To overcome these challenges, we propose the .PcRecord format, a unified data storage solution designed to reduce the storage occupation and accelerate the processing of point cloud data. We also introduce a high-performance data processing pipeline equipped with multiple modules. By leveraging a multi-stage parallel pipeline architecture, our system optimizes the use of computational resources, significantly improving processing speed and efficiency. This paper details the im- plementation of this system and demonstrates its effectiveness in addressing the challenges of handling large-scale point cloud datasets.On average, our system achieves performance improvements of 6.61x (ModelNet40), 2.69x (S3DIS), 2.23x (ShapeNet), 3.09x (Kitti), 8.07x (SUN RGB-D), and 5.67x (ScanNet) with GPU and 6.9x, 1.88x, 1.29x, 2.28x, 25.4x, and 19.3x with Ascend.

IDProxy: Cold-Start CTR Prediction for Ads and Recommendation at Xiaohongshu with Multimodal LLMs

Click-through rate (CTR) models in advertising and recommendation systems rely heavily on item ID embeddings, which struggle in item cold-start settings. We present IDProxy, a solution that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate proxy embeddings from rich content signals, enabling effective CTR prediction for new items without usage data. These proxies are explicitly aligned with the existing ID embedding space and are optimized end-to-end under CTR objectives together with the ranking model, allowing seamless integration into existing large-scale ranking pipelines. Offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate the effectiveness of IDProxy, which has been successfully deployed in both Content Feed and Display Ads features of Xiaohongshu's Explore Feed, serving hundreds of millions of users daily.

Agentic AI-RAN: Enabling Intent-Driven, Explainable and Self-Evolving Open RAN Intelligence

Open RAN (O-RAN) exposes rich control and telemetry interfaces across the Non-RT RIC, Near-RT RIC, and distributed units, but also makes it harder to operate multi-tenant, multi-objective RANs in a safe and auditable manner. In parallel, agentic AI systems with explicit planning, tool use, memory, and self-management offer a natural way to structure long-lived control loops. This article surveys how such agentic controllers can be brought into O-RAN: we review the O-RAN architecture, contrast agentic controllers with conventional ML/RL xApps, and organise the task landscape around three clusters: network slice life-cycle, radio resource management (RRM) closed loops, and cross-cutting security, privacy, and compliance. We then introduce a small set of agentic primitives (Plan-Act-Observe-Reflect, skills as tool use, memory and evidence, and self-management gates) and show, in a multi-cell O-RAN simulation, how they improve slice life-cycle and RRM performance compared to conventional baselines and ablations that remove individual primitives. Security, privacy, and compliance are discussed as architectural constraints and open challenges for standards-aligned deployments. This framework achieves an average 8.83\% reduction in resource usage across three classic network slices.

CAMEL: Confidence-Gated Reflection for Reward Modeling

Reward models play a fundamental role in aligning large language models with human preferences. Existing methods predominantly follow two paradigms: scalar discriminative preference models, which are efficient but lack interpretability, and generative judging models, which offer richer reasoning at the cost of higher computational overhead. We observe that the log-probability margin between verdict tokens strongly correlates with prediction correctness, providing a reliable proxy for instance difficulty without additional inference cost. Building on this insight, we propose CAMEL, a confidence-gated reflection framework that performs a lightweight single-token preference decision first and selectively invokes reflection only for low-confidence instances. To induce effective self-correction, we train the model via reinforcement learning with counterfactual prefix augmentation, which exposes the model to diverse initial verdicts and encourages genuine revision. Empirically, CAMEL achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely used reward-model benchmarks with 82.9% average accuracy, surpassing the best prior model by 3.2% and outperforming 70B-parameter models using only 14B parameters, while establishing a strictly better accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier.

FOCUS: Efficient Keyframe Selection for Long Video Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) represent images and video frames as visual tokens. Scaling from single images to hour-long videos, however, inflates the token budget far beyond practical limits. Popular pipelines therefore either uniformly subsample or apply keyframe selection with retrieval-style scoring using smaller vision-language models. However, these keyframe selection methods still rely on pre-filtering before selection to reduce the inference cost and can miss the most informative moments. We propose FOCUS, Frame-Optimistic Confidence Upper-bound Selection, a training-free, model-agnostic keyframe selection module that selects query-relevant frames under a strict token budget. FOCUS formulates keyframe selection as a combinatorial pure-exploration (CPE) problem in multi-armed bandits: it treats short temporal clips as arms, and uses empirical means and Bernstein confidence radius to identify informative regions while preserving exploration of uncertain areas. The resulting two-stage exploration-exploitation procedure reduces from a sequential policy with theoretical guarantees, first identifying high-value temporal regions, then selecting top-scoring frames within each region On two long-video question-answering benchmarks, FOCUS delivers substantial accuracy improvements while processing less than 2% of video frames. For videos longer than 20 minutes, it achieves an 11.9% gain in accuracy on LongVideoBench, demonstrating its effectiveness as a keyframe selection method and providing a simple and general solution for scalable long-video understanding with MLLMs.

SGS-3D: High-Fidelity 3D Instance Segmentation via Reliable Semantic Mask Splitting and Growing

Accurate 3D instance segmentation is crucial for high-quality scene understanding in the 3D vision domain. However, 3D instance segmentation based on 2D-to-3D lifting approaches struggle to produce precise instance-level segmentation, due to accumulated errors introduced during the lifting process from ambiguous semantic guidance and insufficient depth constraints. To tackle these challenges, we propose splitting and growing reliable semantic mask for high-fidelity 3D instance segmentation (SGS-3D), a novel "split-then-grow" framework that first purifies and splits ambiguous lifted masks using geometric primitives, and then grows them into complete instances within the scene. Unlike existing approaches that directly rely on raw lifted masks and sacrifice segmentation accuracy, SGS-3D serves as a training-free refinement method that jointly fuses semantic and geometric information, enabling effective cooperation between the two levels of representation. Specifically, for semantic guidance, we introduce a mask filtering strategy that leverages the co-occurrence of 3D geometry primitives to identify and remove ambiguous masks, thereby ensuring more reliable semantic consistency with the 3D object instances. For the geometric refinement, we construct fine-grained object instances by exploiting both spatial continuity and high-level features, particularly in the case of semantic ambiguity between distinct objects. Experimental results on ScanNet200, ScanNet++, and KITTI-360 demonstrate that SGS-3D substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness against inaccurate masks from pre-trained models, yielding high-fidelity object instances while maintaining strong generalization across diverse indoor and outdoor environments. Code is available in the supplementary materials.

PAF-Net: Phase-Aligned Frequency Decoupling Network for Multi-Process Manufacturing Quality Prediction

Accurate quality prediction in multi-process manufacturing is critical for industrial efficiency but hindered by three core challenges: time-lagged process interactions, overlapping operations with mixed periodicity, and inter-process dependencies in shared frequency bands. To address these, we propose PAF-Net, a frequency decoupled time series prediction framework with three key innovations: (1) A phase-correlation alignment method guided by frequency domain energy to synchronize time-lagged quality series, resolving temporal misalignment. (2) A frequency independent patch attention mechanism paired with Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) decomposition to capture heterogeneous operational features within individual series. (3) A frequency decoupled cross attention module that suppresses noise from irrelevant frequencies, focusing exclusively on meaningful dependencies within shared bands. Experiments on 4 real-world datasets demonstrate PAF-Net's superiority. It outperforms 10 well-acknowledged baselines by 7.06% lower MSE and 3.88% lower MAE. Our code is available at https://github.com/StevenLuan904/PAF-Net-Official.

PrefixAgent: An LLM-Powered Design Framework for Efficient Prefix Adder Optimization

Prefix adders are fundamental arithmetic circuits, but their design space grows exponentially with bit-width, posing significant optimization challenges. Previous works face limitations in performance, generalization, and scalability. To address these challenges, we propose PrefixAgent, a large language model (LLM)-powered framework that enables efficient prefix adder optimization. Specifically, PrefixAgent reformulates the problem into subtasks including backbone synthesis and structure refinement, which effectively reduces the search space. More importantly, this new design perspective enables us to efficiently collect enormous high-quality data and reasoning traces with E-graph, which further results in an effective fine-tuning of LLM. Experimental results show that PrefixAgent synthesizes prefix adders with consistently smaller areas compared to baseline methods, while maintaining scalability and generalization in commercial EDA flows.