Accelerating Structured Chain-of-Thought in Autonomous Vehicles

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances the decision-making capabilities of vision-language-action models in autonomous driving, but its autoregressive nature introduces significant inference latency, making it impractical for real-time applications. To address this, we introduce FastDriveCoT, a novel parallel decoding method that accelerates template-structured CoT. Our approach decomposes the reasoning process into a dependency graph of distinct sub-tasks, such as identifying critical objects and summarizing traffic rules, some of which can be generated in parallel. By generating multiple independent reasoning steps concurrently within a single forward pass, we significantly reduce the number of sequential computations. Experiments demonstrate a 3-4$\times$ speedup in CoT generation and a substantial reduction in end-to-end latency across various model architectures, all while preserving the original downstream task improvements brought by incorporating CoT reasoning.

VideoGPA: Distilling Geometry Priors for 3D-Consistent Video Generation

While recent video diffusion models (VDMs) produce visually impressive results, they fundamentally struggle to maintain 3D structural consistency, often resulting in object deformation or spatial drift. We hypothesize that these failures arise because standard denoising objectives lack explicit incentives for geometric coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoGPA (Video Geometric Preference Alignment), a data-efficient self-supervised framework that leverages a geometry foundation model to automatically derive dense preference signals that guide VDMs via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This approach effectively steers the generative distribution toward inherent 3D consistency without requiring human annotations. VideoGPA significantly enhances temporal stability, physical plausibility, and motion coherence using minimal preference pairs, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in extensive experiments.

ETS: Energy-Guided Test-Time Scaling for Training-Free RL Alignment

Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training alignment for language models is effective, but also costly and unstable in practice, owing to its complicated training process. To address this, we propose a training-free inference method to sample directly from the optimal RL policy. The transition probability applied to Masked Language Modeling (MLM) consists of a reference policy model and an energy term. Based on this, our algorithm, Energy-Guided Test-Time Scaling (ETS), estimates the key energy term via online Monte Carlo, with a provable convergence rate. Moreover, to ensure practical efficiency, ETS leverages modern acceleration frameworks alongside tailored importance sampling estimators, substantially reducing inference latency while provably preserving sampling quality. Experiments on MLM (including autoregressive models and diffusion language models) across reasoning, coding, and science benchmarks show that our ETS consistently improves generation quality, validating its effectiveness and design.

CADENT: Gated Hybrid Distillation for Sample-Efficient Transfer in Reinforcement Learning

Transfer learning promises to reduce the high sample complexity of deep reinforcement learning (RL), yet existing methods struggle with domain shift between source and target environments. Policy distillation provides powerful tactical guidance but fails to transfer long-term strategic knowledge, while automaton-based methods capture task structure but lack fine-grained action guidance. This paper introduces Context-Aware Distillation with Experience-gated Transfer (CADENT), a framework that unifies strategic automaton-based knowledge with tactical policy-level knowledge into a coherent guidance signal. CADENT's key innovation is an experience-gated trust mechanism that dynamically weighs teacher guidance against the student's own experience at the state-action level, enabling graceful adaptation to target domain specifics. Across challenging environments, from sparse-reward grid worlds to continuous control tasks, CADENT achieves 40-60\% better sample efficiency than baselines while maintaining superior asymptotic performance, establishing a robust approach for adaptive knowledge transfer in RL.

Towards a Theoretical Understanding to the Generalization of RLHF

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and its variants have emerged as the dominant approaches for aligning Large Language Models with human intent. While empirically effective, the theoretical generalization properties of these methods in high-dimensional settings remain to be explored. To this end, we build the generalization theory on RLHF of LLMs under the linear reward model, through the framework of algorithmic stability. In contrast to the existing works built upon the consistency of maximum likelihood estimations on reward model, our analysis is presented under an end-to-end learning framework, which is consistent with practice. Concretely, we prove that under a key \textbf{feature coverage} condition, the empirical optima of policy model have a generalization bound of order $\mathcal{O}(n^{-\frac{1}{2}})$. Moreover, the results can be extrapolated to parameters obtained by gradient-based learning algorithms, i.e., Gradient Ascent (GA) and Stochastic Gradient Ascent (SGA). Thus, we argue that our results provide new theoretical evidence for the empirically observed generalization of LLMs after RLHF.

EVolSplat4D: Efficient Volume-based Gaussian Splatting for 4D Urban Scene Synthesis

Novel view synthesis (NVS) of static and dynamic urban scenes is essential for autonomous driving simulation, yet existing methods often struggle to balance reconstruction time with quality. While state-of-the-art neural radiance fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting approaches achieve photorealism, they often rely on time-consuming per-scene optimization. Conversely, emerging feed-forward methods frequently adopt per-pixel Gaussian representations, which lead to 3D inconsistencies when aggregating multi-view predictions in complex, dynamic environments. We propose EvolSplat4D, a feed-forward framework that moves beyond existing per-pixel paradigms by unifying volume-based and pixel-based Gaussian prediction across three specialized branches. For close-range static regions, we predict consistent geometry of 3D Gaussians over multiple frames directly from a 3D feature volume, complemented by a semantically-enhanced image-based rendering module for predicting their appearance. For dynamic actors, we utilize object-centric canonical spaces and a motion-adjusted rendering module to aggregate temporal features, ensuring stable 4D reconstruction despite noisy motion priors. Far-Field scenery is handled by an efficient per-pixel Gaussian branch to ensure full-scene coverage. Experimental results on the KITTI-360, KITTI, Waymo, and PandaSet datasets show that EvolSplat4D reconstructs both static and dynamic environments with superior accuracy and consistency, outperforming both per-scene optimization and state-of-the-art feed-forward baselines.

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Under Constrained Communications

Centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) has been the dominant paradigm in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but its reliance on global state information during training introduces scalability, robustness, and generalization bottlenecks. Moreover, in practical scenarios such as adding/dropping teammates or facing environment dynamics that differ from the training, CTDE methods can be brittle and costly to retrain, whereas distributed approaches allow agents to adapt using only local information and peer-to-peer communication. We present a distributed MARL framework that removes the need for centralized critics or global information. Firstly, we develop a novel Distributed Graph Attention Network (D-GAT) that performs global state inference through multi-hop communication, where agents integrate neighbor features via input-dependent attention weights in a fully distributed manner. Leveraging D-GAT, we develop the distributed graph-attention MAPPO (DG-MAPPO) -- a distributed MARL framework where agents optimize local policies and value functions using local observations, multi-hop communication, and shared/averaged rewards. Empirical evaluation on the StarCraftII Multi-Agent Challenge, Google Research Football, and Multi-Agent Mujoco demonstrates that our method consistently outperforms strong CTDE baselines, achieving superior coordination across a wide range of cooperative tasks with both homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. Our distributed MARL framework provides a principled and scalable solution for robust collaboration, eliminating the need for centralized training or global observability. To the best of our knowledge, DG-MAPPO appears to be the first to fully eliminate reliance on privileged centralized information, enabling agents to learn and act solely through peer-to-peer communication.

Distribution-Centric Policy Optimization Dominates Exploration-Exploitation Trade-off

The exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs). With Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), training tends to be exploitation driven: entropy decreases monotonically, samples convergence, and exploration fades. Most existing fixes are \textbf{sample-centric}: they seek or bonus rare samples, assuming exploration comes from novel trajectories and tokens. These heuristics depend on the "luck" of informative samples, lack principled control of the policy, and often yield limited or inconsistent gains. In this work, we are the first to introduce a \textbf{distribution-centric} perspective for RL, in which exploration is always guided by a "better" target distribution, and reveal that a policy's ability to resist entropy collapse is governed by the distribution itself rather than individual samples. Building on this insight, we propose Distribution-Centric Policy Optimization (DCPO), which reformulates entropy regulation as distribution-level regularization. DCPO achieves controllable entropy fully on-policy without sampling from external distributions, enabling efficient exploration while maintaining training stability. Across multiple models and seven benchmarks, DCPO improves over GRPO by about 20\% on average. Overall, DCPO replaces sample-level heuristics with distribution-level principles, offering a theoretically grounded and flexible framework for controllable exploration and a stronger EE trade-off. The code is available in https://github.com/597358816/DCPO.

ECGomics: An Open Platform for AI-ECG Digital Biomarker Discovery

Background: Conventional electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis faces a persistent dichotomy: expert-driven features ensure interpretability but lack sensitivity to latent patterns, while deep learning offers high accuracy but functions as a black box with high data dependency. We introduce ECGomics, a systematic paradigm and open-source platform for the multidimensional deconstruction of cardiac signals into digital biomarker. Methods: Inspired by the taxonomic rigor of genomics, ECGomics deconstructs cardiac activity across four dimensions: Structural, Intensity, Functional, and Comparative. This taxonomy synergizes expert-defined morphological rules with data-driven latent representations, effectively bridging the gap between handcrafted features and deep learning embeddings. Results: We operationalized this framework into a scalable ecosystem consisting of a web-based research platform and a mobile-integrated solution (https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/ECGomics). The web platform facilitates high-throughput analysis via precision parameter configuration, high-fidelity data ingestion, and 12-lead visualization, allowing for the systematic extraction of biomarkers across the four ECGomics dimensions. Complementarily, the mobile interface, integrated with portable sensors and a cloud-based engine, enables real-time signal acquisition and near-instantaneous delivery of structured diagnostic reports. This dual-interface architecture successfully transitions ECGomics from theoretical discovery to decentralized, real-world health management, ensuring professional-grade monitoring in diverse clinical and home-based settings. Conclusion: ECGomics harmonizes diagnostic precision, interpretability, and data efficiency. By providing a deployable software ecosystem, this paradigm establishes a robust foundation for digital biomarker discovery and personalized cardiovascular medicine.

OpenNavMap: Structure-Free Topometric Mapping via Large-Scale Collaborative Localization

Scalable and maintainable map representations are fundamental to enabling large-scale visual navigation and facilitating the deployment of robots in real-world environments. While collaborative localization across multi-session mapping enhances efficiency, traditional structure-based methods struggle with high maintenance costs and fail in feature-less environments or under significant viewpoint changes typical of crowd-sourced data. To address this, we propose OPENNAVMAP, a lightweight, structure-free topometric system leveraging 3D geometric foundation models for on-demand reconstruction. Our method unifies dynamic programming-based sequence matching, geometric verification, and confidence-calibrated optimization to robust, coarse-to-fine submap alignment without requiring pre-built 3D models. Evaluations on the Map-Free benchmark demonstrate superior accuracy over structure-from-motion and regression baselines, achieving an average translation error of 0.62m. Furthermore, the system maintains global consistency across 15km of multi-session data with an absolute trajectory error below 3m for map merging. Finally, we validate practical utility through 12 successful autonomous image-goal navigation tasks on simulated and physical robots. Code and datasets will be publicly available in https://rpl-cs-ucl.github.io/OpenNavMap_page.