Plug-and-Play Logit Fusion for Heterogeneous Pathology Foundation Models

Pathology foundation models (FMs) have become central to computational histopathology, offering strong transfer performance across a wide range of diagnostic and prognostic tasks. The rapid proliferation of pathology foundation models creates a model-selection bottleneck: no single model is uniformly best, yet exhaustively adapting and validating many candidates for each downstream endpoint is prohibitively expensive. We address this challenge with a lightweight and novel model fusion strategy, LogitProd, which treats independently trained FM-based predictors as fixed experts and learns sample-adaptive fusion weights over their slide-level outputs. The fusion operates purely on logits, requiring no encoder retraining and no feature-space alignment across heterogeneous backbones. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that the optimal weighted product fusion is guaranteed to perform at least as well as the best individual expert under the training objective. We systematically evaluate LogitProd on \textbf{22} benchmarks spanning WSI-level classification, tile-level classification, gene mutation prediction, and discrete-time survival modeling. LogitProd ranks first on 20/22 tasks and improves the average performance across all tasks by ~3% over the strongest single expert. LogitProd enables practitioners to upgrade heterogeneous FM-based pipelines in a plug-and-play manner, achieving multi-expert gains with $\sim$12$\times$ lower training cost than feature-fusion alternatives.

Unified Spatiotemporal Token Compression for Video-LLMs at Ultra-Low Retention

Video large language models (Video-LLMs) face high computational costs due to large volumes of visual tokens. Existing token compression methods typically adopt a two-stage spatiotemporal compression strategy, relying on stage-specific metrics and an implicit assumption of spatiotemporal separability. Under extremely low retention ratios, however, such approaches often result in unbalanced allocation and loss of visual evidence essential for question answering. We reformulate token compression as a spatiotemporal allocation task within a global token retention pool. We propose a unified selection mechanism that integrates attention weights and semantic similarity to globally select tokens with high contribution and low redundancy. Unselected tokens are merged via clustering and refilled, preserving information integrity. Inside the LLM, we further introduce text-aware merging to perform secondary compression based on query relevance. Without requiring retraining, our method serves as a plug-and-play module compatible with existing Video-LLMs. Experiments show that retaining only about 2% of visual tokens preserves 90.1% of baseline performance across multiple benchmarks, while reducing FLOPs to roughly 2.6%. These benefits generalize across diverse backbones, decreasing end-to-end inference latency and memory consumption. Our unified spatiotemporal token compression strategy establishes the state-of-the-art in video understanding under ultra-low token retention.

SPAN-Nav: Generalized Spatial Awareness for Versatile Vision-Language Navigation

Recent embodied navigation approaches leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong generalization in versatile Vision-Language Navigation (VLN). However, reliable path planning in complex environments remains challenging due to insufficient spatial awareness. In this work, we introduce SPAN-Nav, an end-to-end foundation model designed to infuse embodied navigation with universal 3D spatial awareness using RGB video streams. SPAN-Nav extracts spatial priors across diverse scenes through an occupancy prediction task on extensive indoor and outdoor environments. To mitigate the computational burden, we introduce a compact representation for spatial priors, finding that a single token is sufficient to encapsulate the coarse-grained cues essential for navigation tasks. Furthermore, inspired by the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism, SPAN-Nav utilizes this single spatial token to explicitly inject spatial cues into action reasoning through an end-to end framework. Leveraging multi-task co-training, SPAN-Nav captures task-adaptive cues from generalized spatial priors, enabling robust spatial awareness to generalize even to the task lacking explicit spatial supervision. To support comprehensive spatial learning, we present a massive dataset of 4.2 million occupancy annotations that covers both indoor and outdoor scenes across multi-type navigation tasks. SPAN-Nav achieves state-of-the-art performance across three benchmarks spanning diverse scenarios and varied navigation tasks. Finally, real-world experiments validate the robust generalization and practical reliability of our approach across complex physical scenarios.

Robometer: Scaling General-Purpose Robotic Reward Models via Trajectory Comparisons

General-purpose robot reward models are typically trained to predict absolute task progress from expert demonstrations, providing only local, frame-level supervision. While effective for expert demonstrations, this paradigm scales poorly to large-scale robotics datasets where failed and suboptimal trajectories are abundant and assigning dense progress labels is ambiguous. We introduce Robometer, a scalable reward modeling framework that combines intra-trajectory progress supervision with inter-trajectory preference supervision. Robometer is trained with a dual objective: a frame-level progress loss that anchors reward magnitude on expert data, and a trajectory-comparison preference loss that imposes global ordering constraints across trajectories of the same task, enabling effective learning from both real and augmented failed trajectories. To support this formulation at scale, we curate RBM-1M, a reward-learning dataset comprising over one million trajectories spanning diverse robot embodiments and tasks, including substantial suboptimal and failure data. Across benchmarks and real-world evaluations, Robometer learns more generalizable reward functions than prior methods and improves robot learning performance across a diverse set of downstream applications. Code, model weights, and videos at https://robometer.github.io/.

Multi-dimensional Assessment and Explainable Feedback for Counselor Responses to Client Resistance in Text-based Counseling with LLMs

Effectively addressing client resistance is a sophisticated clinical skill in psychological counseling, yet practitioners often lack timely and scalable supervisory feedback to refine their approaches. Although current NLP research has examined overall counseling quality and general therapeutic skills, it fails to provide granular evaluations of high-stakes moments where clients exhibit resistance. In this work, we present a comprehensive pipeline for the multi-dimensional evaluation of human counselors' interventions specifically targeting client resistance in text-based therapy. We introduce a theory-driven framework that decomposes counselor responses into four distinct communication mechanisms. Leveraging this framework, we curate and share an expert-annotated dataset of real-world counseling excerpts, pairing counselor-client interactions with professional ratings and explanatory rationales. Using this data, we perform full-parameter instruction tuning on a Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct backbone to model fine-grained evaluative judgments of response quality and generate explanations underlying. Experimental results show that our approach can effectively distinguish the quality of different communication mechanisms (77-81% F1), substantially outperforming GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet (45-59% F1). Moreover, the model produces high-quality explanations that closely align with expert references and receive near-ceiling ratings from human experts (2.8-2.9/3.0). A controlled experiment with 43 counselors further confirms that receiving these AI-generated feedback significantly improves counselors' ability to respond effectively to client resistance.

CARE: An Explainable Computational Framework for Assessing Client-Perceived Therapeutic Alliance Using Large Language Models

Client perceptions of the therapeutic alliance are critical for counseling effectiveness. Accurately capturing these perceptions remains challenging, as traditional post-session questionnaires are burdensome and often delayed, while existing computational approaches produce coarse scores, lack interpretable rationales, and fail to model holistic session context. We present CARE, an LLM-based framework to automatically predict multi-dimensional alliance scores and generate interpretable rationales from counseling transcripts. Built on the CounselingWAI dataset and enriched with 9,516 expert-curated rationales, CARE is fine-tuned using rationale-augmented supervision with the LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct backbone. Experiments show that CARE outperforms leading LLMs and substantially reduces the gap between counselor evaluations and client-perceived alliance, achieving over 70% higher Pearson correlation with client ratings. Rationale-augmented supervision further improves predictive accuracy. CARE also produces high-quality, contextually grounded rationales, validated by both automatic and human evaluations. Applied to real-world Chinese online counseling sessions, CARE uncovers common alliance-building challenges, illustrates how interaction patterns shape alliance development, and provides actionable insights, demonstrating its potential as an AI-assisted tool for supporting mental health care.

RECAP: Resistance Capture in Text-based Mental Health Counseling with Large Language Models

Recognizing and navigating client resistance is critical for effective mental health counseling, yet detecting such behaviors is particularly challenging in text-based interactions. Existing NLP approaches oversimplify resistance categories, ignore the sequential dynamics of therapeutic interventions, and offer limited interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose PsyFIRE, a theoretically grounded framework capturing 13 fine-grained resistance behaviors alongside collaborative interactions. Based on PsyFIRE, we construct the ClientResistance corpus with 23,930 annotated utterances from real-world Chinese text-based counseling, each supported by context-specific rationales. Leveraging this dataset, we develop RECAP, a two-stage framework that detects resistance and fine-grained resistance types with explanations. RECAP achieves 91.25% F1 for distinguishing collaboration and resistance and 66.58% macro-F1 for fine-grained resistance categories classification, outperforming leading prompt-based LLM baselines by over 20 points. Applied to a separate counseling dataset and a pilot study with 62 counselors, RECAP reveals the prevalence of resistance, its negative impact on therapeutic relationships and demonstrates its potential to improve counselors' understanding and intervention strategies.

A Unified 3D Object Perception Framework for Real-Time Outside-In Multi-Camera Systems

Accurate 3D object perception and multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) tracking are fundamental for the digital transformation of industrial infrastructure. However, transitioning "inside-out" autonomous driving models to "outside-in" static camera networks presents significant challenges due to heterogeneous camera placements and extreme occlusion. In this paper, we present an adapted Sparse4D framework specifically optimized for large-scale infrastructure environments. Our system leverages absolute world-coordinate geometric priors and introduces an occlusion-aware ReID embedding module to maintain identity stability across distributed sensor networks. To bridge the Sim2Real domain gap without manual labeling, we employ a generative data augmentation strategy using the NVIDIA COSMOS framework, creating diverse environmental styles that enhance the model's appearance-invariance. Evaluated on the AI City Challenge 2025 benchmark, our camera-only framework achieves a state-of-the-art HOTA of $45.22$. Furthermore, we address real-time deployment constraints by developing an optimized TensorRT plugin for Multi-Scale Deformable Aggregation (MSDA). Our hardware-accelerated implementation achieves a $2.15\times$ speedup on modern GPU architectures, enabling a single Blackwell-class GPU to support over 64 concurrent camera streams.

HippMetric: A skeletal-representation-based framework for cross-sectional and longitudinal hippocampal substructural morphometry

Accurate characterization of hippocampal substructure is crucial for detecting subtle structural changes and identifying early neurodegenerative biomarkers. However, high inter-subject variability and complex folding pattern of human hippocampus hinder consistent cross-subject and longitudinal analysis. Most existing approaches rely on subject-specific modelling and lack a stable intrinsic coordinate system to accommodate anatomical variability, which limits their ability to establish reliable inter- and intra-individual correspondence. To address this, we propose HippMetric, a skeletal representation (s-rep)-based framework for hippocampal substructural morphometry and point-wise correspondence across individuals and scans. HippMetric builds on the Axis-Referenced Morphometric Model (ARMM) and employs a deformable skeletal coordinate system aligned with hippocampal anatomy and function, providing a biologically grounded reference for correspondence. Our framework comprises two core modules: a skeletal-based coordinate system that respects the hippocampus' conserved longitudinal lamellar architecture, in which functional units (lamellae) are stacked perpendicular to the long-axis, enabling anatomically consistent localization across subjects and time; and individualized s-reps generated through surface reconstruction, deformation, and geometrically constrained spoke refinement, enforcing boundary adherence, orthogonality and non-intersection to produce mathematically valid skeletal geometry. Extensive experiments on two international cohorts demonstrate that HippMetric achieves higher accuracy, reliability, and correspondence stability compared to existing shape models.

Parallel Sampling via Autospeculation

We present parallel algorithms to accelerate sampling via counting in two settings: any-order autoregressive models and denoising diffusion models. An any-order autoregressive model accesses a target distribution $μ$ on $[q]^n$ through an oracle that provides conditional marginals, while a denoising diffusion model accesses a target distribution $μ$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$ through an oracle that provides conditional means under Gaussian noise. Standard sequential sampling algorithms require $\widetilde{O}(n)$ time to produce a sample from $μ$ in either setting. We show that, by issuing oracle calls in parallel, the expected sampling time can be reduced to $\widetilde{O}(n^{1/2})$. This improves the previous $\widetilde{O}(n^{2/3})$ bound for any-order autoregressive models and yields the first parallel speedup for diffusion models in the high-accuracy regime, under the relatively mild assumption that the support of $μ$ is bounded. We introduce a novel technique to obtain our results: speculative rejection sampling. This technique leverages an auxiliary ``speculative'' distribution~$ν$ that approximates~$μ$ to accelerate sampling. Our technique is inspired by the well-studied ``speculative decoding'' techniques popular in large language models, but differs in key ways. Firstly, we use ``autospeculation,'' namely we build the speculation $ν$ out of the same oracle that defines~$μ$. In contrast, speculative decoding typically requires a separate, faster, but potentially less accurate ``draft'' model $ν$. Secondly, the key differentiating factor in our technique is that we make and accept speculations at a ``sequence'' level rather than at the level of single (or a few) steps. This last fact is key to unlocking our parallel runtime of $\widetilde{O}(n^{1/2})$.