Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimxization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval.

DSP-Reg: Domain-Sensitive Parameter Regularization for Robust Domain Generalization

Domain Generalization (DG) is a critical area that focuses on developing models capable of performing well on data from unseen distributions, which is essential for real-world applications. Existing approaches primarily concentrate on learning domain-invariant features, which assume that a model robust to variations in the source domains will generalize well to unseen target domains. However, these approaches neglect a deeper analysis at the parameter level, which makes the model hard to explicitly differentiate between parameters sensitive to domain shifts and those robust, potentially hindering its overall ability to generalize. In order to address these limitations, we first build a covariance-based parameter sensitivity analysis framework to quantify the sensitivity of each parameter in a model to domain shifts. By computing the covariance of parameter gradients across multiple source domains, we can identify parameters that are more susceptible to domain variations, which serves as our theoretical foundation. Based on this, we propose Domain-Sensitive Parameter Regularization (DSP-Reg), a principled framework that guides model optimization by a soft regularization technique that encourages the model to rely more on domain-invariant parameters while suppressing those that are domain-specific. This approach provides a more granular control over the model's learning process, leading to improved robustness and generalization to unseen domains. Extensive experiments on benchmarks, such as PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, and DomainNet, demonstrate that DSP-Reg outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average accuracy of 66.7\% and surpassing all baselines.

Decoder Gradient Shields: A Family of Provable and High-Fidelity Methods Against Gradient-Based Box-Free Watermark Removal

Box-free model watermarking has gained significant attention in deep neural network (DNN) intellectual property protection due to its model-agnostic nature and its ability to flexibly manage high-entropy image outputs from generative models. Typically operating in a black-box manner, it employs an encoder-decoder framework for watermark embedding and extraction. While existing research has focused primarily on the encoders for the robustness to resist various attacks, the decoders have been largely overlooked, leading to attacks against the watermark. In this paper, we identify one such attack against the decoder, where query responses are utilized to obtain backpropagated gradients to train a watermark remover. To address this issue, we propose Decoder Gradient Shields (DGSs), a family of defense mechanisms, including DGS at the output (DGS-O), at the input (DGS-I), and in the layers (DGS-L) of the decoder, with a closed-form solution for DGS-O and provable performance for all DGS. Leveraging the joint design of reorienting and rescaling of the gradients from watermark channel gradient leaking queries, the proposed DGSs effectively prevent the watermark remover from achieving training convergence to the desired low-loss value, while preserving image quality of the decoder output. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DGSs in diverse application scenarios. Our experimental results on deraining and image generation tasks with the state-of-the-art box-free watermarking show that our DGSs achieve a defense success rate of 100% under all settings.

HFedMoE: Resource-aware Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Mixture-of-Experts

While federated learning (FL) enables fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) without compromising data privacy, the substantial size of an LLM renders on-device training impractical for resource-constrained clients, such as mobile devices. Thus, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a computation-efficient solution, which activates only a sparse subset of experts during model training to reduce computing burden without sacrificing performance. Though integrating MoE into FL fine-tuning holds significant potential, it still encounters three key challenges: i) selecting appropriate experts for clients remains challenging due to the lack of a reliable metric to measure each expert's impact on local fine-tuning performance, ii) the heterogeneous computing resources across clients severely hinder MoE-based LLM fine-tuning, as dynamic expert activations across diverse input samples can overwhelm resource-constrained devices, and iii) client-specific expert subsets and routing preference undermine global aggregation, where misaligned expert updates and inconsistent gating networks in troduce destructive interference. To address these challenges, we propose HFedMoE, a heterogeneous MoE-based FL fine-tuning framework that customizes a subset of experts to each client for computation-efficient LLM fine-tuning. Specifically, HFedMoE identifies the expert importance based on its contributions to fine-tuning performance, and then adaptively selects a subset of experts from an information bottleneck perspective to align with each client' s computing budget. A sparsity-aware model aggregation strategy is also designed to aggregate the actively fine-tuned experts and gating parameters with importance weighted contributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HFedMoE outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in training accuracy and convergence speed.

Shared Spatial Memory Through Predictive Coding

Sharing and reconstructing a consistent spatial memory is a critical challenge in multi-agent systems, where partial observability and limited bandwidth often lead to catastrophic failures in coordination. We introduce a multi-agent predictive coding framework that formulate coordination as the minimization of mutual uncertainty among agents. Instantiated as an information bottleneck objective, it prompts agents to learn not only who and what to communicate but also when. At the foundation of this framework lies a grid-cell-like metric as internal spatial coding for self-localization, emerging spontaneously from self-supervised motion prediction. Building upon this internal spatial code, agents gradually develop a bandwidth-efficient communication mechanism and specialized neural populations that encode partners' locations: an artificial analogue of hippocampal social place cells (SPCs). These social representations are further enacted by a hierarchical reinforcement learning policy that actively explores to reduce joint uncertainty. On the Memory-Maze benchmark, our approach shows exceptional resilience to bandwidth constraints: success degrades gracefully from 73.5% to 64.4% as bandwidth shrinks from 128 to 4 bits/step, whereas a full-broadcast baseline collapses from 67.6% to 28.6%. Our findings establish a theoretically principled and biologically plausible basis for how complex social representations emerge from a unified predictive drive, leading to social collective intelligence.

Distribution-Aligned Decoding for Efficient LLM Task Adaptation

Adapting billion-parameter language models to a downstream task is still costly, even with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We re-cast task adaptation as output-distribution alignment: the objective is to steer the output distribution toward the task distribution directly during decoding rather than indirectly through weight updates. Building on this view, we introduce Steering Vector Decoding (SVD), a lightweight, PEFT-compatible, and theoretically grounded method. We start with a short warm-start fine-tune and extract a task-aware steering vector from the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence gradient between the output distribution of the warm-started and pre-trained models. This steering vector is then used to guide the decoding process to steer the model's output distribution towards the task distribution. We theoretically prove that SVD is first-order equivalent to the gradient step of full fine-tuning and derive a globally optimal solution for the strength of the steering vector. Across three tasks and nine benchmarks, SVD paired with four standard PEFT methods improves multiple-choice accuracy by up to 5 points and open-ended truthfulness by 2 points, with similar gains (1-2 points) on commonsense datasets without adding trainable parameters beyond the PEFT adapter. SVD thus offers a lightweight, theoretically grounded path to stronger task adaptation for large language models.

Dynamic Uncertainty-aware Multimodal Fusion for Outdoor Health Monitoring

Outdoor health monitoring is essential to detect early abnormal health status for safeguarding human health and safety. Conventional outdoor monitoring relies on static multimodal deep learning frameworks, which requires extensive data training from scratch and fails to capture subtle health status changes. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) emerge as a promising alternative, utilizing only small datasets to fine-tune pre-trained information-rich models for enabling powerful health status monitoring. Unfortunately, MLLM-based outdoor health monitoring also faces significant challenges: I) sensor data contains input noise stemming from sensor data acquisition and fluctuation noise caused by sudden changes in physiological signals due to dynamic outdoor environments, thus degrading the training performance; ii) current transformer based MLLMs struggle to achieve robust multimodal fusion, as they lack a design for fusing the noisy modality; iii) modalities with varying noise levels hinder accurate recovery of missing data from fluctuating distributions. To combat these challenges, we propose an uncertainty-aware multimodal fusion framework, named DUAL-Health, for outdoor health monitoring in dynamic and noisy environments. First, to assess the impact of noise, we accurately quantify modality uncertainty caused by input and fluctuation noise with current and temporal features. Second, to empower efficient muitimodal fusion with low-quality modalities,we customize the fusion weight for each modality based on quantified and calibrated uncertainty. Third, to enhance data recovery from fluctuating noisy modalities, we align modality distributions within a common semantic space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DUAL-Health outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in detection accuracy and robustness.

NWaaS: Nonintrusive Watermarking as a Service for X-to-Image DNN

The intellectual property of deep neural network (DNN) models can be protected with DNN watermarking, which embeds copyright watermarks into model parameters (white-box), model behavior (black-box), or model outputs (box-free), and the watermarks can be subsequently extracted to verify model ownership or detect model theft. Despite recent advances, these existing methods are inherently intrusive, as they either modify the model parameters or alter the structure. This natural intrusiveness raises concerns about watermarking-induced shifts in model behavior and the additional cost of fine-tuning, further exacerbated by the rapidly growing model size. As a result, model owners are often reluctant to adopt DNN watermarking in practice, which limits the development of practical Watermarking as a Service (WaaS) systems. To address this issue, we introduce Nonintrusive Watermarking as a Service (NWaaS), a novel trustless paradigm designed for X-to-Image models, in which we hypothesize that with the model untouched, an owner-defined watermark can still be extracted from model outputs. Building on this concept, we propose ShadowMark, a concrete implementation of NWaaS which addresses critical deployment challenges by establishing a robust and nonintrusive side channel in the protected model's black-box API, leveraging a key encoder and a watermark decoder. It is significantly distinctive from existing solutions by attaining the so-called absolute fidelity and being applicable to different DNN architectures, while being also robust against existing attacks, eliminating the fidelity-robustness trade-off. Extensive experiments on image-to-image, noise-to-image, noise-and-text-to-image, and text-to-image models, demonstrate the efficacy and practicality of ShadowMark for real-world deployment of nonintrusive DNN watermarking.

Task-Oriented Communications for Visual Navigation with Edge-Aerial Collaboration in Low Altitude Economy

To support the Low Altitude Economy (LAE), precise unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) localization in urban areas where global positioning system (GPS) signals are unavailable. Vision-based methods offer a viable alternative but face severe bandwidth, memory and processing constraints on lightweight UAVs. Inspired by mammalian spatial cognition, we propose a task-oriented communication framework, where UAVs equipped with multi-camera systems extract compact multi-view features and offload localization tasks to edge servers. We introduce the Orthogonally-constrained Variational Information Bottleneck encoder (O-VIB), which incorporates automatic relevance determination (ARD) to prune non-informative features while enforcing orthogonality to minimize redundancy. This enables efficient and accurate localization with minimal transmission cost. Extensive evaluation on a dedicated LAE UAV dataset shows that O-VIB achieves high-precision localization under stringent bandwidth budgets. Code and dataset will be made publicly available: github.com/fangzr/TOC-Edge-Aerial.

PartialLoading: User Scheduling and Bandwidth Allocation for Parameter-sharing Edge Inference

By provisioning inference offloading services, edge inference drives the rapid growth of AI applications at the network edge. However, achieving high task throughput with stringent latency requirements remains a significant challenge. To address this issue, we develop a parameter-sharing AI model loading (PartialLoading) framework for multi-user edge inference, which exploits two key insights: 1) the majority of latency arises from loading AI models into server GPU memory, and 2) different AI models can share a significant number of parameters, for which redundant loading should be avoided. Towards this end, we formulate a joint multi-user scheduling and spectrum bandwidth allocation problem to maximize task throughput by exploiting shared parameter blocks across models. The intuition is to judiciously schedule user requests to reuse the shared parameter blocks between consecutively loaded models, thereby reducing model loading time substantially. To facilitate solution finding, we decouple the problem into two sub-problems, i.e., user scheduling and bandwidth allocation, showing that solving them sequentially is equivalent to solving the original problem. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, we first study an important special case called the "bottom-layer-sharing" case, where AI models share some bottom layers within clusters, and design a dynamic programming-based algorithm to obtain the optimal solution in polynomial time. For the general case, where shared parameter blocks appear at arbitrary positions within AI models, we propose a greedy heuristic to obtain the sub-optimal solution efficiently. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves task throughput under deadline constraints compared with user scheduling without exploiting parameter sharing.