Department of Information Security, Naval University of Engineering, Wuhan, Hubei, 430033, China
Abstract:Generating long-horizon music videos (MVs) is frequently constrained by prohibitive computational costs and difficulty maintaining cross-shot consistency. We propose AllocMV, a hierarchical framework formulating music video synthesis as a Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP). AllocMV represents the video's persistent state as a compact, structured object comprising character entities, scene priors, and sharing graphs, produced by a global planner prior to realization. By estimating segment saliency from multimodal cues, a group-level MCKP solver based on dynamic programming optimally allocates resources across High-Gen, Mid-Gen, and Reuse branches. For repetitive musical motifs, we implement a divergence-based forking strategy that reuses visual prefixes to reduce costs while ensuring motif-level continuity. Evaluated via the Cost-Quality Ratio (CQR), AllocMV achieves an optimal trade-off between perceived quality and resource expenditure under strict budgetary and rhythmic constraints.
Abstract:Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has become a promising solution to alleviate the annotation burden of deep learning-based medical image segmentation models. While recent advances in foundation model-driven SSL have pushed the boundary to extremely limited annotation scenarios, they fail to maintain robust competitive performance in complex imaging modalities. In this paper, we propose SemiSAM-O1, an annotation-efficient framework using only one annotated template image for segmentation. SemiSAM-O1 extends the specialist-generalist collaborative learning framework to the extreme one-label setting by fully exploiting the foundation model's feature representation capability beyond its prompting interface. SemiSAM-O1 operates in two stages. In the first stage, the foundation model's encoder extracts dense features from all volumes, and class prototypes derived from the single annotated template are propagated to the unlabeled pool via feature similarity to produce coarse initial pseudo-labels. In the second stage, an iterative training-and-refinement loop progressively improves both the segmentation model and the pseudo-labels over multiple rounds, where each round trains the model from scratch on current pseudo-labels and generates updated predictions with voxel-wise uncertainty estimates. An uncertainty-guided refinement step further leverages the foundation model's global feature space to correct high-uncertainty regions by aggregating labels from their most similar confident neighbors, establishing a virtuous cycle of mutual improvement. Extensive experiments on a wide range of segmentation tasks across different modalities and anatomical targets demonstrate that SemiSAM-O1 significantly narrows the performance gap between one-label semi-supervised learning and full supervision, while significantly reducing the computational overhead of online foundation model inference.
Abstract:Individual agent capabilities have advanced rapidly through modular skills and tool integrations, yet multi-agent systems remain constrained by fixed team structures, tightly coupled coordination logic, and session-bound learning. We argue that this reflects a deeper absence: a principled organisational layer that governs how a workforce of agents is assembled, governed, and improved over time, decoupled from what individual agents know. To fill this gap, we introduce \emph{OneManCompany (OMC)}, a framework that elevates multi-agent systems to the organisational level. OMC encapsulates skills, tools, and runtime configurations into portable agent identities called \emph{Talents}, orchestrated through typed organisational interfaces that abstract over heterogeneous backends. A community-driven \emph{Talent Market} enables on-demand recruitment, allowing the organisation to close capability gaps and reconfigure itself dynamically during execution. Organisational decision-making is operationalised through an \emph{Explore-Execute-Review} ($\text{E}^2$R) tree search, which unifies planning, execution, and evaluation in a single hierarchical loop: tasks are decomposed top-down into accountable units and execution outcomes are aggregated bottom-up to drive systematic review and refinement. This loop provides formal guarantees on termination and deadlock freedom while mirroring the feedback mechanisms of human enterprises. Together, these contributions transform multi-agent systems from static, pre-configured pipelines into self-organising and self-improving AI organisations capable of adapting to open-ended tasks across diverse domains. Empirical evaluation on PRDBench shows that OMC achieves an $84.67\%$ success rate, surpassing the state of the art by $15.48$ percentage points, with cross-domain case studies further demonstrating its generality.
Abstract:Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieve impressive performance across a wide range of multimodal tasks. However, on some tasks that demand fine-grained visual perception, they often fail even when the required information is present in their internal representations. In this work, we demonstrate that this gap arises from their narrow training pipeline which focuses on moving visual information to the textual space. Consequently, VLMs can only reason about visual entities that can be mapped to known concepts in the language space, leaving vision-focused tasks such as visual correspondence and reasoning about novel visual entities poorly supported. As a result, VLMs are severely limited in several important multimodal capabilities because they rely on brittle, hallucinated textual descriptions of visual entities that they cannot map to textual representations. We verify this behavior through visual correspondence tasks, in which VLMs must detect matching entities between two images. Testing across semantic, shape, and face correspondence tasks, we find that VLMs perform much better when the relevant entities are nameable in language than when they are unnameable. Mechanistically, our Logit Lens analyses confirm that VLMs explicitly assign semantic labels to nameable entities and surface more unique corresponding tokens compared to unnameable entities. Furthermore, we show that teaching completely arbitrary names for unknown entities improves performance, yet task-specific finetuning yields even stronger generalization without relying on language priors. Our findings suggest that current VLM failures on visual tasks reflect learned shortcuts from their training, rather than a fundamental limitation of multimodal architectures.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in math education not only as problem solvers but also as assessors of learners' reasoning. However, it remains unclear whether stronger math problem-solving ability is associated with stronger step-level assessment performance. This study examines that relationship using the GSM8K and MATH subsets of PROCESSBENCH, a human-annotated benchmark for identifying the earliest erroneous step in mathematical reasoning. We evaluate two LLM-based math tutor agent settings, instantiated with GPT-4 and GPT-5, in two independent tasks on the same math problems: solving the original problem and assessing a benchmark-provided solution by predicting the earliest erroneous step. Results show a consistent within-model pattern: assessment accuracy is substantially higher on math problem items the same model solved correctly than on items it solved incorrectly, with statistically significant associations across both models and datasets. At the same time, assessment remains more difficult than direct problem solving, especially on error-present solutions. These findings suggest that math problem-solving expertise supports stronger assessment performance, but reliable step-level diagnosis also requires additional capabilities such as step tracking, monitoring, and precise error localization. The results have implications for the design and evaluation of AI-supported Adaptive Instructional Systems (AISs) for formative assessment in math education.
Abstract:PET/CT imaging is pivotal in oncology and nuclear medicine, yet summarizing complex findings into precise diagnostic impressions is labor-intensive. While LLMs have shown promise in medical text generation, their capability in the highly specialized domain of PET/CT remains underexplored. We introduce PET-F2I-41K (PET Findings-to-Impression Benchmark), a large-scale benchmark for PET/CT impression generation using LLMs, constructed from over 41k real-world reports. Using PET-F2I-41K, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 27 models across proprietary frontier LLMs, open-source generalist models, and medical-domain LLMs, and we develop a domain-adapted 7B model (PET-F2I-7B) fine-tuned from Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct via LoRA. Beyond standard NLG metrics (e.g., BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, BERTScore), we propose three clinically grounded metrics - Entity Coverage Rate (ECR), Uncovered Entity Rate (UER), and Factual Consistency Rate (FCR) - to assess diagnostic completeness and factual reliability. Experiments reveal that neither frontier nor medical-domain LLMs perform adequately in zero-shot settings. In contrast, PET-F2I-7B achieves substantial gains (e.g., 0.708 BLEU-4) and a 3.0x improvement in entity coverage over the strongest baseline, while offering advantages in cost, latency, and privacy. Beyond this modeling contribution, PET-F2I-41K establishes a standardized evaluation framework to accelerate the development of reliable and clinically deployable reporting systems for PET/CT.
Abstract:Generative policies based on diffusion and flow matching achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation by modeling multi-modal human demonstrations. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) integration introduces substantial latency, limiting high-frequency closed-loop control. Recent single-step acceleration methods alleviate this overhead but often exhibit distributional collapse, producing averaged trajectories that fail to execute coherent manipulation strategies. We propose a framework that distills a Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) expert into a fast single-step student via Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE). A bi-directional Chamfer distance provides a set-level objective that promotes both mode coverage and fidelity, enabling preservation of the teacher multi-modal action distribution in a single forward pass. A unified perception encoder further integrates multi-view RGB, depth, point clouds, and proprioception into a geometry-aware representation. The resulting high-frequency control supports real-time receding-horizon re-planning and improved robustness under dynamic disturbances.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL), large language models (LLMs), and vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely studied in isolation. However, existing infrastructure lacks the ability to deploy agents from different decision-making paradigms within the same environment, making it difficult to study them in hybrid multi-agent settings or to compare their behaviour fairly under identical conditions. We present MOSAIC, an open-source platform that bridges this gap by incorporating a diverse set of existing reinforcement learning environments and enabling heterogeneous agents (RL policies, LLMs, VLMs, and human players) to operate within them in ad-hoc team settings with reproducible results. MOSAIC introduces three contributions. (i) An IPC-based worker protocol that wraps both native and third-party frameworks as isolated subprocess workers, each executing its native training and inference logic unmodified, communicating through a versioned inter-process protocol. (ii) An operator abstraction that forms an agent-level interface by mapping workers to agents: each operator, regardless of whether it is backed by an RL policy, an LLM, or a human, conforms to a minimal unified interface. (iii) A deterministic cross-paradigm evaluation framework offering two complementary modes: a manual mode that advances up to N concurrent operators in lock-step under shared seeds for fine-grained visual inspection of behavioural differences, and a script mode that drives automated, long-running evaluation through declarative Python scripts, for reproducible experiments. We release MOSAIC as an open, visual-first platform to facilitate reproducible cross-paradigm research across the RL, LLM, and human-in-the-loop communities.
Abstract:Existing alignment paradigms remain limited in capturing the pluralistic nature of human values. Overton Pluralism addresses this gap by generating responses with diverse perspectives from a single query. This paper introduces OP-GRPO (Overton Pluralistic Group Relative Policy Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework for implicit Overton Pluralism that enables a single large language model to produce pluralistic responses without explicit prompting or modular orchestration. Our workflow consists of two main steps. First, similarity estimator training fine-tunes a Sentence Transformer for Overton Pluralism tasks to provide more accurate coverage evaluation of generated responses. Second, OP-GRPO training incorporates this similarity estimator into a dual-reward system designed to ensure both broad coverage of genuine human perspectives and the uniqueness of each perspective, thereby promoting diversity. Empirical results demonstrate a "small models, big perspective coverage" effect. The trained Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct model surpasses a 20B GPT-OSS baseline with a 37.4 percent relative accuracy gain on a Natural Language Inference benchmark, and also outperforms a modular architecture baseline with a 19.1 percent relative improvement. Additional evaluations using GPT-4.1 as a large language model judge further confirm the robustness of the approach.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) increasingly combine long-context processing with advanced reasoning, enabling them to retrieve and synthesize information distributed across tens of thousands of tokens. A hypothesis is that stronger reasoning capability should improve safety by helping models recognize harmful intent even when it is not stated explicitly. We test this hypothesis in long-context settings where harmful intent is implicit and must be inferred through reasoning, and find that it does not hold. We introduce compositional reasoning attacks, a new threat model in which a harmful query is decomposed into incomplete fragments that scattered throughout a long context. The model is then prompted with a neutral reasoning query that induces retrieval and synthesis, causing the harmful intent to emerge only after composition. Evaluating 14 frontier LLMs on contexts up to 64k tokens, we uncover three findings: (1) models with stronger general reasoning capability are not more robust to compositional reasoning attacks, often assembling the intent yet failing to refuse; (2) safety alignment consistently degrades as context length increases; and (3) inference-time reasoning effort is a key mitigating factor: increasing inference-time compute reduces attack success by over 50 percentage points on GPT-oss-120b model. Together, these results suggest that safety does not automatically scale with reasoning capability, especially under long-context inference.