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Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Can Li, Ying Liu, Ting Zhang, Mei Wang, Hua Huang

Large multimodal models have achieved remarkable progress in integrating vision and language, enabling strong performance across perception, reasoning, and domain-specific tasks. However, their capacity to reason over multiple, visually similar inputs remains insufficiently explored. Such fine-grained comparative reasoning is central to real-world tasks, especially in mathematics and education, where learners must often distinguish between nearly identical diagrams to identify correct solutions. To address this gap, we present VisioMath, a curated benchmark of 1,800 high-quality K–12 mathematics problems in which all candidate answers are diagrams with subtle visual similarities. A comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LMMs, covering both leading closed-source systems and widely adopted open-source models, reveals a consistent decline in accuracy as inter-image similarity increases. Analysis indicates that the dominant failure mode stems from image–text misalignment: rather than grounding reasoning in textual cues, models often resort to shallow positional heuristics, resulting in systematic errors. We further explore three alignment-oriented strategies, spanning training-free approaches and finetuning, and achieve substantial accuracy gains. We hope that VisioMath will serve as a rigorous benchmark and catalyst for developing LMMs toward deeper diagram understanding, precise comparative reasoning, and grounded multi-image–text integration. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Nefefilibata/VisioMath.

Sukwon Yun, Jie Peng, Pingzhi Li, Wendong Fan, Jie Chen, James Y Zou, Guohao Li, Tianlong Chen

With an ever-growing zoo of LLMs and benchmarks, the need to orchestrate multiple models for improved task performance has never been more pressing. While frameworks like Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) attempt to coordinate LLMs, they often fall short in terms of (1) selecting relevant agents, (2) facilitating effective intra-agent communication, and (3) integrating responses efficiently. In this work, we propose Graph-of-Agents (GoA), a new graph-based framework for modeling multi-agent LLM communication. Our approach begins with node sampling, selecting only the most relevant agents by leveraging model cards that summarize each model’s domain, task specialization, and other characteristics. Next, we construct edges between the selected agents by evaluating their responses against one another to determine relevance ordering. Directed message passing is then performed from highly relevant agents to less relevant ones to enhance their responses, followed by reverse message passing to refine the original responses of the more relevant agents. Finally, the updated responses are aggregated via graph-based pooling (e.g., max or mean pooling) to produce a single, unified answer. We evaluate GoA on diverse multi-domain benchmarks (MMLU, MMLU-Pro, GPQA) and domain-specific benchmarks (MATH, HumanEval, MedMCQA), with an agent pool of 6 LLMs spanning multiple domains. Surprisingly, GoA achieves superior performance18 using only 3 selected agents, outperforming recent multi-agent LLM baselines that utilize all 6 agents simultaneously. By adopting a graph structure, GoA offers both scalability and effectiveness through structured message passing—positioning it as a strong candidate for navigating the challenges of the ever-growing LLM zoo.

Reinforcement Learning · Batch/Offline

Simon Zhan, Qingyuan Wu, Zhaofeng Wang, Frank Yang, Xiangyu Shi, Chao Huang, Qi Zhu

Offline–to–online deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents often stumbles over two fundamental gaps: (1) the sim-to-real gap, where real-world systems exhibit latency and other physical imperfections not captured in simulation; and (2) the interaction gap, where policies trained purely offline face out-of-distribution (OOD) issues during online execution, as collecting new interaction data is costly or risky. As a result, agents must generalize from static, delay-free datasets to dynamic, delay-prone environments. In this work, we propose $\textbf{DT-CORL}$ ($\textbf{D}$elay-$\textbf{T}$ransformer belief policy $\textbf{C}$onstrained $\textbf{O}$ffline $\textbf{RL}$), a novel framework for learning delay-resilient policies solely from static, delay-free offline data. DT-CORL introduces a transformer-based belief model to infer latent states from delayed observations and jointly trains this belief with a constrained policy objective, ensuring that value estimation and belief representation remain aligned throughout learning. Crucially, our method does not require access to delayed transitions during training and outperforms naive history-augmented baselines, SOTA delayed RL methods, and existing belief-based approaches. Empirically, we demonstrate that DT-CORL achieves strong delay-robust generalization across both locomotion and goal-conditioned tasks in the D4RL benchmark under varying delay regimes. Our results highlight that joint belief-policy optimization is essential for bridging the sim-to-real latency gap and achieving stable performance in delayed environments.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Xuemiao Zhang, Can Ren, Chengying Tu, Rongxiang Weng, Shuo Wang, Hongfei Yan, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai

Recent progress in large reasoning models for challenging mathematical reasoning has been driven by reinforcement learning (RL). Incorporating long chain-of-thought (CoT) data during mid-training has also been shown to substantially improve reasoning depth. However, current approaches often utilize CoT data indiscriminately, leaving open the critical question of which data types most effectively enhance model reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we define the foundation model's reasoning potential for the first time as the inverse of the number of independent attempts required to correctly answer the question, which is strongly correlated with the final model performance. We then propose utilizing diverse data enriched with high-value reasoning patterns to expand the reasoning potential. Specifically, we abstract atomic reasoning patterns from CoT sequences, characterized by commonality and inductive capabilities, and use them to construct a core reference set enriched with valuable reasoning patterns. Furthermore, we propose a dual-granularity algorithm involving chains of reasoning patterns and token entropy, efficiently selecting high-value CoT data (CoTP) from the data pool that aligns with the core set, thereby training models to master reasoning effectively. Only 10B-token CoTP data enables the 85A6B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model to improve by **9.58\%** on the challenging AIME 2024 and 2025, and to raise the upper bound of downstream RL performance by **7.81\%**.

zanyi wang, Dengyang Jiang, Liuzhuozheng Li, Sizhe Dang, Chengzu Li, Harry Yang, Guang Dai, Mengmeng Wang, Jingdong Wang

Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) requires segmenting specific objects in a video guided by a natural language description. The core challenge of RVOS is to anchor abstract linguistic concepts onto a specific set of pixels and continuously segment them through the complex dynamics of a video. Faced with this difficulty, prior work has often decomposed the task into a pragmatic `locate-then-segment' pipeline. However, this cascaded design creates an information bottleneck by simplifying semantics into coarse geometric prompts (e.g, point), and struggles to maintain temporal consistency as the segmenting process is often decoupled from the initial language grounding. To overcome these fundamental limitations, we propose FlowRVS, a novel framework that reconceptualizes RVOS as a conditional continuous flow problem. This allows us to harness the inherent strengths of pretrained T2V models, fine-grained pixel control, text-video semantic alignment, and temporal coherence. Instead of conventional generating from noise to mask or directly predicting mask, we reformulate the task by learning a direct, language-guided deformation from a video's holistic representation to its target mask. Our one-stage, generative approach achieves new state-of-the-art results across all major RVOS benchmarks. Specifically, achieving a J&F of 51.1 in MeViS (+1.6 over prior SOTA) and 73.3 in the zero shot Ref-DAVIS17 (+2.7), demonstrating the significant potential of modeling video understanding tasks as continuous deformation processes.

Optimization · Everything Else

Shuo Chen, Xiaolong Li, Jiaying Peng, Yao Zhao

Gradient descent (GD) is a fundamental optimization method in deep learning, yet its asymptotic directional properties remain less understood. In this paper, we prove that if GD converges, its trajectory either aligns toward a fixed direction or oscillates along a specific line. The fixed-direction convergence occurs under small learning rates, while the oscillatory convergence behavior emerges for large learning rates. This result offers a new lens for understanding long-term GD dynamics. Experimentally, we find that this directional convergence behavior also appears in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Adam. Furthermore, we discuss how these theoretical findings regarding oscillatory convergence might offer a perspective on the sharpness dynamics observed in the Edge of Stability (EoS) regime. Our work provides both theoretical clarity and practical insight into the behavior of dynamics for multiple optimization methods.

Yan Yang, Dongxu Li, Yutong Dai, Yuhao Yang, Ziyang Luo, Zirui Zhao, Zhiyuan Hu, Junzhe Huang, Amrita Saha, Zeyuan Chen 等

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents autonomously complete tasks across platforms (\eg, Linux) by sequentially decomposing user instructions into action proposals that iteratively interact with visual elements in the evolving environment. However, two main challenges arise: i) planning (\ie, the action proposal sequence) under expansive action space, where selecting an appropriate plan is non-trivial, as many valid ones may exist; ii) accurately grounding actions in complex and high-resolution interfaces, \ie, precisely interacting with visual targets. This paper investigates the aforementioned challenges with our \textbf{G}UI \textbf{T}est-time Scaling \textbf{A}gent, namely \name. First, we conduct test-time scaling to select the most appropriate action proposal: at each step, multiple candidate proposals are sampled and evaluated and selected by a judge model. It trades off computation for better decision quality by concurrent sampling. Second, we propose a model that improves grounding of the selected action proposals to its corresponding visual elements. Our key insight is that reinforcement learning (RL) facilitates grounding through inherent objective alignments, rewarding successful clicks on interface elements. Experimentally, \name achieves state-of-the-art performance on both grounding and agent task execution benchmarks.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Qianben Chen, Jingyi Cao, Jiayu Zhang, Tianrui Qin, LiXiaowan, Zhu, Dingfeng Shi, He Zhu, Minghao Liu, Xiaobo Liang 等

Large language models split into two families: reasoning-centric LLMs, which strengthen internal chain-of-thought reasoning but cannot invoke external tools, and agentic LLMs, which learn to interact with environments and leverage tools but often lag in deep reasoning. This divide arises from fundamentally different training objectives, leading to mismatched strengths and inefficiency on simple queries, where both families tend to overthink or over-call tools. In this work, we present Adaptive Agent Foundation Model (A$^2$FM), a unified framework that follows a route-then-align principle: the model first learns task-aware routing and then aligns mode-specific trajectories under a shared backbone. To address the inefficiency gap, we introduce a third instant mode that handles simple queries directly, preventing unnecessary reasoning or tool calls while complementing the agentic and reasoning modes. To jointly enhance accuracy and efficiency, we propose Adaptive Policy Optimization (APO), which enforces adaptive sampling across modes and applies a cost-regularized reward. On the 32B scale, A$^2$FM achieves 13.4\% on BrowseComp, 70.4\% on AIME25, and 16.7\% on HLE, setting new SOTA among comparable models and performing competitively with frontier LLMs across agentic, reasoning, and general benchmarks. Notably, the adaptive execution achieves a cost of pass of only \$0.00487 per correct answer—cutting cost by 45.2\% relative to reasoning and 33.5\% relative to agentic, thus delivering substantially higher cost efficiency while maintaining comparable accuracy.

Soufiane Hayou, Nikhil Ghosh, Bin Yu

Low-Rank Adaptation is a widely used finetuning method for large models. Its small memory footprint allows practitioners to adapt large models to specific tasks at a fraction of the cost of full finetuning. Different modifications have been proposed to enhance its efficiency by, for example, setting the learning rate, the rank, and the initialization. Another improvement axis is adapter placement strategy: when using LoRA, practitioners usually pick \emph{module types} to adapt with LoRA, such as Query and Key modules. Few works have studied the problem of adapter placement, with nonconclusive results: original LoRA paper suggested placing adapters in attention modules, while other works suggested placing them in the MLP modules. Through an intuitive theoretical analysis, we introduce PLoP (Precise LoRA Placement), a lightweight method that allows automatic identification of module types where LoRA adapters should be placed, given a pretrained model and a finetuning task. We demonstrate that PLoP consistently outperforms, and in the worst case competes, with commonly used placement strategies through comprehensive experiments on supervised finetuning and reinforcement learning for reasoning.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Zheng Ding, Weirui Ye

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for aligning generative models with human preferences, but its prohibitive computational cost remains a major barrier to widespread adoption. We introduce **TreeGRPO**, a novel RL framework that dramatically improves training efficiency by recasting the denoising process as a search tree. From shared initial noise samples, TreeGRPO strategically branches to generate multiple candidate trajectories while efficiently reusing their common prefixes. This tree-structured approach delivers three key advantages: (1) *High sample efficiency*, achieving better performance under same training samples (2) *Fine-grained credit assignment* via reward backpropagation that computes step-specific advantages, overcoming the uniform credit assignment limitation of trajectory-based methods, and (3) *Amortized computation* where multi-child branching enables multiple policy updates per forward pass. Extensive experiments on both diffusion and flow-based models demonstrate that TreeGRPO achieves **2.4$\times$** faster training} while establishing a superior Pareto frontier in the efficiency-reward trade-off space. Our method consistently outperforms GRPO baselines across multiple benchmarks and reward models, providing a scalable and effective pathway for RL-based visual generative model alignment. The project website is available at https://treegrpo.github.io.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Long Xing, Qidong Huang, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Jinsong Li, Shuangrui Ding, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu 等

This paper presents ScaleCap, a scalable image captioning strategy that generates comprehensive and detailed image captions. The key challenges of high-quality image captioning lie in the inherent biases of LVLMs: multimodal bias resulting in imbalanced descriptive granularity, offering detailed accounts of some elements while merely skimming over others; linguistic bias leading to hallucinated de- scriptions of non-existent objects. To address these issues, we propose a scalable debiased captioning strategy, which continuously enriches and calibrates the caption with increased inference budget. Specifically, we propose two novel components: heuristic question answering and contrastive sentence rating. The former generates content-specific questions based on the image and answers them to progressively inject relevant information into the caption. The latter employs sentence-level offline contrastive decoding to effectively identify and eliminate hallucinations caused by linguistic biases. With increased inference cost, more heuristic questions are raised by ScaleCap to progressively capture additional visual details, generating captions that are more accurate, balanced, and informative. Extensive modality alignment experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ScaleCap. Annotating 450K images with ScaleCap and using them for LVLM pretraining leads to consis- tent performance gains across 11 widely used benchmarks. Furthermore, ScaleCap showcases superb richness and fidelity of generated captions with two additional tasks: replacing images with captions in VQA task, and reconstructing images from captions to assess semantic coverage.

General Machine Learning · Representation Learning

Tung Tran, Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas, Khoat Than

A fundamental requirement for intelligent systems is the ability to learn continuously under changing environments. However, models trained in this regime often suffer from catastrophic forgetting. Leveraging pre-trained models has recently emerged as a promising solution, since their generalized feature extractors enable faster and more robust adaptation. While some earlier works mitigate forgetting by fine-tuning only on the first task, this approach quickly deteriorates as the number of tasks grows and the data distributions diverge. More recent research instead seeks to consolidate task knowledge into a unified backbone, or adapting the backbone as new tasks arrive. However, such approaches may create a (potential) \textit{mismatch} between task-specific classifiers and the adapted backbone. To address this issue, we propose a novel \textit{Local Classifier Alignment} (LCA) loss to better align the classifier with backbone. Theoretically, we show that this LCA loss can enable the classifier to not only generalize well for all observed tasks, but also improve robustness. Furthermore, we develop a complete solution for continual learning, following the model merging approach and using LCA. Extensive experiments on several standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method often achieves leading performance, sometimes surpasses the state-of-the-art methods with a large margin.

Junze Wang, Lei Fan, Dezheng Zhang, Weipeng Jing, Donglin Di, Yang Song, Sidong Liu, Cong Cong

Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) enables effective adaptation of a frozen Vision Transformer (ViT) to downstream tasks by inserting a small number of learnable prompt tokens into the token sequence at each layer. However, we observe that existing VPT variants often suffer from unstable training dynamics, characterized by gradient oscillations. A closer layer-wise analysis reveals that shallow-layer prompts tend to stagnate early, while deeper-layer prompts exhibit high-variance oscillations, leading to a cross-layer mismatch. These issues contribute to slower convergence and degraded final performance. To address these challenges, we propose the Prompt-Agnostic Evolution ($\mathtt{PAE}$) method, which can strengthen vision prompt tuning by explicitly modeling the dynamics of learnable prompts. From a frequency-domain perspective, we initialize prompts in a task-aware direction by uncovering and propagating frequency shortcut patterns that the backbone inherently exploits for recognition. To ensure coherent evolution across layers, we further employ a shared Koopman operator, which imposes a global linear transformation rather than uncoordinated, layer-specific updates. Finally, inspired by Lyapunov stability theory, we introduce a regularizer that constrains error amplification during evolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that using $\mathtt{PAE}$ with VPT variants not only accelerates convergence with an average 1.41$\times$ speedup but also yields 1–3% gains on 25 datasets with multi downstream tasks. Beyond performance, $\mathtt{PAE}$ remains prompt-agnostic and lightweight, and it integrates seamlessly with diverse VPT variants without backbone modification or inference-time changes, providing a practical and scalable solution for advancing prompt tuning.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Haohui Liang, Runlin Huang, Yingjun Du, Yujia Hu, Weifeng Su, Cees G Snoek

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization across diverse tasks by leveraging large-scale image-text pretraining. However, their performance is notoriously unstable under variations in natural language prompts, posing a considerable challenge for reliable real-world deployment. To address this prompt sensitivity, we propose Promise, a meta-learning framework for prompt-Robust vision-language models via meta-finetuning, which explicitly learns to generalize across diverse prompt formulations. Our method operates in a dual-loop meta-finetuning setting: the inner loop adapts token embeddings based on a set of varied prompts, while the outer loop optimizes for generalization on unseen prompt variants. To further improve robustness, we introduce an adaptive prompt weighting mechanism that dynamically emphasizes more generalizable prompts and a token-specific learning rate module that fine-tunes individual prompt tokens based on contextual importance. We further establish that Promise’s weighted and preconditioned inner update provably (i) yields a one-step decrease of the outer empirical risk together with a contraction of across-prompt sensitivity, and (ii) tightens a data-dependent generalization bound evaluated at the post-inner initialization. Across 15 benchmarks spanning base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, and domain shift, our approach consistently reduces prompt sensitivity and improves performance stability over existing prompt learning methods.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Alireza Mousavi-Hosseini, Stephen Zhang, Michal Klein, marco cuturi

Flow models parameterized as time-dependent velocity fields can generate data from noise by integrating an ODE. These models are often trained using flow matching, i.e. by sampling random pairs of noise and target points $(x_0,x_1)$ and ensuring that the velocity field is aligned, on average, with $x_1-x_0$ when evaluated along a time-indexed segment linking $x_0$ to $x_1$. While these noise/data pairs are sampled independently by default, they can also be selected more carefully by matching batches of $n$ noise to $n$ target points using an optimal transport (OT) solver. Although promising in theory, the OT flow matching (OT-FM) approach (Pooladian et al., 2023, Tong et al., 2024) is not widely used in practice. Zhang et al. (2025), pointed out recently that OT-FM truly starts paying off when the batch size $n$ grows significantly, which only a multi-GPU implementation of the Sinkhorn algorithm can handle. Unfortunately, the pre-compute costs of running Sinkhorn can quickly balloon, requiring $O(n^2/\varepsilon^2)$ operations for every $n$ pairs used to fit the velocity field, where $\varepsilon$ is a regularization parameter that should be typically small to yield better results. To fulfill the theoretical promises of OT-FM, we propose to move away from batch-OT and rely instead on a semidiscrete formulation that can leverage the fact that the target dataset distribution is usually of finite size $N$. The SD-OT problem is solved by estimating a dual potential vector of size $N$ using SGD; using that vector, freshly sampled noise vectors at train time can then be matched with data points at the cost of a maximum inner product search (MIPS) over the dataset. Semidiscrete FM (SD-FM) removes the quadratic dependency on $n/\varepsilon$ that bottlenecks OT-FM. SD-FM beats both FM and OT-FM on all training metrics and inference budget constraints, across multiple datasets, on unconditional/conditional generation, or when using mean-flow models.

YiFan Zhang, Xingyu Lu, Xiao Hu, Chaoyou Fu, Bin Wen, Tianke Zhang, Changyi Liu, Kaiyu Jiang, Kaibing Chen, Kaiyu Tang 等

Multimodal Reward Models (MRMs) play a crucial role in enhancing the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). While recent advancements have primarily focused on improving the model structure and training data of MRMs, there has been limited exploration into the effectiveness of long-term reasoning capabilities for reward modeling and how to activate these capabilities in MRMs. In this paper, we explore how Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to improve reward modeling. Specifically, we reformulate the reward modeling problem as a rule-based RL task. However, we observe that directly applying existing RL algorithms, such as Reinforce++, to reward modeling often leads to training instability or even collapse due to the inherent limitations of these algorithms. To address this issue, we propose the StableReinforce algorithm, which refines the training loss, advantage estimation strategy, and reward design of existing RL methods. These refinements result in more stable training dynamics and superior performance. To facilitate MRM training, we collect 200K preference data from diverse datasets. Our reward model, R1-Reward, trained using the StableReinforce algorithm on this dataset, significantly improves performance on multimodal reward modeling benchmarks. Compared to previous SOTA models, R1-Reward achieves a 8.4% improvement on the VL Reward-Bench and a 14.3% improvement on the Multimodal Reward Bench. Moreover, with more inference compute, R1-Reward's performance is further enhanced, highlighting the potential of RL algorithms in optimizing MRMs.

Yifu QIU, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk

We introduce V-SONAR, a vision–language embedding space extended from the text-only embedding space SONAR (Omnilingual Embeddings Team et al., 2026), which supports 1500 text languages and 177 speech languages. To construct V-SONAR, we propose a post-hoc alignment pipeline that maps the representations of an existing vision encoder into the SONAR space. We thoroughly evaluate V-SONAR and show that its embeddings achieve competitive performance on text-to-video retrieval. Equipped with the OMNISONAR text decoder, V-SONAR further surpasses state-of-the-art vision–language models on video captioning tasks, including DREAM-1K (BLEU 23.9 vs. 19.6) and PE-VIDEO (BLEU 39.0 vs. 30.0). Leveraging V-SONAR, we first demonstrate that the Large Concept Model (LCM; LCM team et al. 2024) operating in SONAR and trained with English text only, can perform both single- and multi-visual concept understanding in a zero-shot manner. Finally, we introduce V-LCM, which extends the LCM with vision–language instruction tuning. V-LCM encodes vision and language inputs into an unified sequence of latent embeddings via V-SONAR and SONAR, and it is trained with the same latent diffusion objective for next-embedding prediction as in LCM’s text-only pre-training. Experiments on a large-scale multilingual and -modal instruction–tuning data mixture highlight the potential of V-LCM: V-LCM matches state-of-the-art vision-language models on tasks covering image/video captioning and question answering, while significantly outperforming them across 61 rich- to low-resource languages out of all 62 tested languages.

Applications · Physics

Wanjia Zhao, Qinwei (Martin) Ma, Jingzhe Shi, Shirley Wu, Jiaqi Han, Yijia Xiao, Si-Yuan Chen, Xiao Luo, Ludwig Schmidt, James Y Zou

Benchmarks for competition-style reasoning have advanced evaluation in mathematics and programming, yet physics remains comparatively underexplored. Most existing physics benchmarks evaluate only final answers, which fail to capture reasoning processes, while recent stepwise methods rely on heuristic LLM-as-judge scoring or restrictive linear assumptions, limiting reliability and diagnostic validity. We introduce PRISM-Physics, a process-level evaluation framework and benchmark for complex physics reasoning problems. Solutions are represented as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of formulas, explicitly encoding causal dependencies among intermediate steps to enable fine-grained, interpretable, and theoretically grounded scoring. We prove the optimality of the DAG representation and the corresponding scoring policy. Combining with a fully rule-based method for symbolic formula equivalence matching that we developed, we ensure consistent validation across diverse formulations without heuristic judgments. Results show that our evaluation framework is more aligned with human experts' scoring. Experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs reveal persistent reasoning failures in physics, while step-level scoring offers both diagnostic insight and rich signals for later training. By combining structural rigor, theoretical guarantees, and symbolic validation, PRISM-Physics provides a principled foundation for advancing process-level evaluation and guiding the development of models with deeper scientific reasoning capabilities.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Weilun Feng, Chuanguang Yang, Haotong Qin, Mingqiang Wu, Yuqi Li, Xiangqi Li, Zhulin An, Libo Huang, Yulun Zhang, Michele Magno 等

Diffusion transformers exhibit remarkable video generation capability, yet their prohibitive computational and memory costs hinder practical deployment. Model quantization and attention sparsification are two promising directions for compression, but each alone suffers severe performance degradation under aggressive compression. Combining them promises compounded efficiency gains, but naive integration is ineffective. The sparsity-induced information loss exacerbates quantization noise, leading to amplified attention shifts. To address this, we propose **QuantSparse**, a unified framework that integrates model quantization with attention sparsification. Specifically, we introduce *Multi-Scale Salient Attention Distillation*, which leverages both global structural guidance and local salient supervision to mitigate quantization-induced bias. In addition, we develop *Second-Order Sparse Attention Reparameterization*, which exploits the temporal stability of second-order residuals to efficiently recover information lost under sparsity. Experiments on HunyuanVideo-13B demonstrate that QuantSparse achieves 20.88 PSNR, substantially outperforming the state-of-the-art quantization baseline Q-VDiT (16.85 PSNR), while simultaneously delivering a **3.68$\times$** reduction in storage and **1.88$\times$** acceleration in end-to-end inference.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Minghui Chen, Wenlong Deng, James Y Zou, Han Yu, Xiaoxiao Li

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as part of compound AI systems which coordinate multiple modules (e.g., retrievers, tools, verifiers) over long-horizon workflows. Although recent frameworks that propagate textual feedback globally (e.g., TextGrad make it feasible to optimize such pipelines, we identify two depth-scaling failure modes in long-horizon agentic workflows: 1) exploding textual gradient, where textual feedback grows exponentially with depth, leading to prohibitively long message and amplifies evaluation biases; and 2) vanishing textual gradient, where limited long-context ability causes models overemphasize recent or early feedback, while compression of lengthy feedback causes downstream messages to lose specificity gradually as they propagate many hops upstream. To mitigate these issues, we introduce Textual Equilibrium Propagation (TEP), a local learning principle inspired by Equilibrium Propagation in energy-based models. TEP includes two phases: 1) a free phase where a local LLM critics iteratively refine prompts until reaching equilibrium (no further improvements are suggested); and 2) a nudged phase which applies proximal prompt edits with bounded modification intensity, using task-level objectives that propagate via forward signaling rather than backward feedback chains. This design supports local prompt optimization followed by controlled adaptation toward global goals without the computational burden and signal degradation of global textual backpropagation. Across long-horizon QA benchmarks and multi-agent tool-use dataset, TEP consistently improves accuracy and efficiency over global propagation methods such as TextGrad, with gains that increase at greater depths, while preserving the practicality of black-box LLM components in deep compound AI system.