A Plug-and-Play Learning-based IMU Bias Factor for Robust Visual-Inertial Odometry

The bias of low-cost Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) is a critical factor affecting the performance of Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO). In particular, when visual tracking encounters errors, the optimized bias results may deviate significantly from the true values, adversely impacting the system's stability and localization precision. In this paper, we propose a novel plug-and-play framework featuring the Inertial Prior Network (IPNet), which is designed to accurately estimate IMU bias. Recognizing the substantial impact of initial bias errors in low-cost inertial devices on system performance, our network directly leverages raw IMU data to estimate the mean bias, eliminating the dependency on historical estimates in traditional recursive predictions and effectively preventing error propagation. Furthermore, we introduce an iterative approach to calculate the mean value of the bias for network training, addressing the lack of bias labels in many visual-inertial datasets. The framework is evaluated on two public datasets and one self-collected dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances both localization precision and robustness, with the ATE-RMSE metric improving on average by 46\%. The source code and video will be available at \textcolor{red}{https://github.com/yiyscut/VIO-IPNet.git}.

Uncertainty-Aware Normal-Guided Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Image Sequences

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved impressive rendering performance in novel view synthesis. However, its efficacy diminishes considerably in sparse image sequences, where inherent data sparsity amplifies geometric uncertainty during optimization. This often leads to convergence at suboptimal local minima, resulting in noticeable structural artifacts in the reconstructed scenes.To mitigate these issues, we propose Uncertainty-aware Normal-Guided Gaussian Splatting (UNG-GS), a novel framework featuring an explicit Spatial Uncertainty Field (SUF) to quantify geometric uncertainty within the 3DGS pipeline. UNG-GS enables high-fidelity rendering and achieves high-precision reconstruction without relying on priors. Specifically, we first integrate Gaussian-based probabilistic modeling into the training of 3DGS to optimize the SUF, providing the model with adaptive error tolerance. An uncertainty-aware depth rendering strategy is then employed to weight depth contributions based on the SUF, effectively reducing noise while preserving fine details. Furthermore, an uncertainty-guided normal refinement method adjusts the influence of neighboring depth values in normal estimation, promoting robust results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UNG-GS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both sparse and dense sequences. The code will be open-source.

In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in open-ended dialogue, yet their inability to retain and retrieve relevant information from long-term interactions limits their effectiveness in applications requiring sustained personalization. External memory mechanisms have been proposed to address this limitation, enabling LLMs to maintain conversational continuity. However, existing approaches struggle with two key challenges. First, rigid memory granularity fails to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations. Second, fixed retrieval mechanisms cannot adapt to diverse dialogue contexts and user interaction patterns. In this work, we propose Reflective Memory Management (RMM), a novel mechanism for long-term dialogue agents, integrating forward- and backward-looking reflections: (1) Prospective Reflection, which dynamically summarizes interactions across granularities-utterances, turns, and sessions-into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval, and (2) Retrospective Reflection, which iteratively refines the retrieval in an online reinforcement learning (RL) manner based on LLMs' cited evidence. Experiments show that RMM demonstrates consistent improvement across various metrics and benchmarks. For example, RMM shows more than 10% accuracy improvement over the baseline without memory management on the LongMemEval dataset.

Label Distribution Learning-Enhanced Dual-KNN for Text Classification

Many text classification methods usually introduce external information (e.g., label descriptions and knowledge bases) to improve the classification performance. Compared to external information, some internal information generated by the model itself during training, like text embeddings and predicted label probability distributions, are exploited poorly when predicting the outcomes of some texts. In this paper, we focus on leveraging this internal information, proposing a dual $k$ nearest neighbor (D$k$NN) framework with two $k$NN modules, to retrieve several neighbors from the training set and augment the distribution of labels. For the $k$NN module, it is easily confused and may cause incorrect predictions when retrieving some nearest neighbors from noisy datasets (datasets with labeling errors) or similar datasets (datasets with similar labels). To address this issue, we also introduce a label distribution learning module that can learn label similarity, and generate a better label distribution to help models distinguish texts more effectively. This module eases model overfitting and improves final classification performance, hence enhancing the quality of the retrieved neighbors by $k$NN modules during inference. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.

Generative Risk Minimization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization on Graphs

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on graphs aims at dealing with scenarios where the test graph distribution differs from the training graph distributions. Compared to i.i.d. data like images, the OOD generalization problem on graph-structured data remains challenging due to the non-i.i.d. property and complex structural information on graphs. Recently, several works on graph OOD generalization have explored extracting invariant subgraphs that share crucial classification information across different distributions. Nevertheless, such a strategy could be suboptimal for entirely capturing the invariant information, as the extraction of discrete structures could potentially lead to the loss of invariant information or the involvement of spurious information. In this paper, we propose an innovative framework, named Generative Risk Minimization (GRM), designed to generate an invariant subgraph for each input graph to be classified, instead of extraction. To address the challenge of optimization in the absence of optimal invariant subgraphs (i.e., ground truths), we derive a tractable form of the proposed GRM objective by introducing a latent causal variable, and its effectiveness is validated by our theoretical analysis. We further conduct extensive experiments across a variety of real-world graph datasets for both node-level and graph-level OOD generalization, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our framework GRM.

Symbiotic Cooperation for Web Agents: Harnessing Complementary Strengths of Large and Small LLMs

Web browsing agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous potential in automating complex web-based tasks. Existing approaches typically rely on large LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) to explore web environments and generate trajectory data, which is then used either for demonstration retrieval (for large LLMs) or to distill small LLMs (e.g., Llama3) in a process that remains decoupled from the exploration. In this paper, we propose AgentSymbiotic, an iterative framework that couples data synthesis with task-performance, yielding a "symbiotic improvement" for both large and small LLMs. Our study uncovers a complementary dynamic between LLM types: while large LLMs excel at generating high-quality trajectories for distillation, the distilled small LLMs-owing to their distinct reasoning capabilities-often choose actions that diverge from those of their larger counterparts. This divergence drives the exploration of novel trajectories, thereby enriching the synthesized data. However, we also observe that the performance of small LLMs becomes a bottleneck in this iterative enhancement process. To address this, we propose two innovations in LLM distillation: a speculative data synthesis strategy that mitigates off-policy bias, and a multi-task learning approach designed to boost the reasoning capabilities of the student LLM. Furthermore, we introduce a Hybrid Mode for Privacy Preservation to address user privacy concerns. Evaluated on the WEBARENA benchmark, AgentSymbiotic achieves SOTA performance with both LLM types. Our best Large LLM agent reaches 52%, surpassing the previous best of 45%, while our 8B distilled model demonstrates a competitive 49%, exceeding the prior best of 28%. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Visual Large Language Models for Generalized and Specialized Applications

Visual-language models (VLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for learning a unified embedding space for vision and language. Inspired by large language models, which have demonstrated strong reasoning and multi-task capabilities, visual large language models (VLLMs) are gaining increasing attention for building general-purpose VLMs. Despite the significant progress made in VLLMs, the related literature remains limited, particularly from a comprehensive application perspective, encompassing generalized and specialized applications across vision (image, video, depth), action, and language modalities. In this survey, we focus on the diverse applications of VLLMs, examining their using scenarios, identifying ethics consideration and challenges, and discussing future directions for their development. By synthesizing these contents, we aim to provide a comprehensive guide that will pave the way for future innovations and broader applications of VLLMs. The paper list repository is available: https://github.com/JackYFL/awesome-VLLMs.

BrainMAP: Learning Multiple Activation Pathways in Brain Networks

Functional Magnetic Resonance Image (fMRI) is commonly employed to study human brain activity, since it offers insight into the relationship between functional fluctuations and human behavior. To enhance analysis and comprehension of brain activity, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to the analysis of functional connectivities (FC) derived from fMRI data, due to their ability to capture the synergistic interactions among brain regions. However, in the human brain, performing complex tasks typically involves the activation of certain pathways, which could be represented as paths across graphs. As such, conventional GNNs struggle to learn from these pathways due to the long-range dependencies of multiple pathways. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework BrainMAP to learn Multiple Activation Pathways in Brain networks. BrainMAP leverages sequential models to identify long-range correlations among sequentialized brain regions and incorporates an aggregation module based on Mixture of Experts (MoE) to learn from multiple pathways. Our comprehensive experiments highlight BrainMAP's superior performance. Furthermore, our framework enables explanatory analyses of crucial brain regions involved in tasks. Our code is provided at https://github.com/LzyFischer/Graph-Mamba.

Ontology-Aware RAG for Improved Question-Answering in Cybersecurity Education

Integrating AI into education has the potential to transform the teaching of science and technology courses, particularly in the field of cybersecurity. AI-driven question-answering (QA) systems can actively manage uncertainty in cybersecurity problem-solving, offering interactive, inquiry-based learning experiences. Large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence in AI-driven QA systems, offering advanced language understanding and user engagement. However, they face challenges like hallucinations and limited domain-specific knowledge, which reduce their reliability in educational settings. To address these challenges, we propose CyberRAG, an ontology-aware retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach for developing a reliable and safe QA system in cybersecurity education. CyberRAG employs a two-step approach: first, it augments the domain-specific knowledge by retrieving validated cybersecurity documents from a knowledge base to enhance the relevance and accuracy of the response. Second, it mitigates hallucinations and misuse by integrating a knowledge graph ontology to validate the final answer. Experiments on publicly available cybersecurity datasets show that CyberRAG delivers accurate, reliable responses aligned with domain knowledge, demonstrating the potential of AI tools to enhance education.

Assessing the Impact of Conspiracy Theories Using Large Language Models

Measuring the relative impact of CTs is important for prioritizing responses and allocating resources effectively, especially during crises. However, assessing the actual impact of CTs on the public poses unique challenges. It requires not only the collection of CT-specific knowledge but also diverse information from social, psychological, and cultural dimensions. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest their potential utility in this context, not only due to their extensive knowledge from large training corpora but also because they can be harnessed for complex reasoning. In this work, we develop datasets of popular CTs with human-annotated impacts. Borrowing insights from human impact assessment processes, we then design tailored strategies to leverage LLMs for performing human-like CT impact assessments. Through rigorous experiments, we textit{discover that an impact assessment mode using multi-step reasoning to analyze more CT-related evidence critically produces accurate results; and most LLMs demonstrate strong bias, such as assigning higher impacts to CTs presented earlier in the prompt, while generating less accurate impact assessments for emotionally charged and verbose CTs.