Deep Learning-Based Airway Segmentation in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Patients with Interstitial Lung Disease (SLE-ILD): A Comparative High-Resolution CT Analysis

To characterize lobar and segmental airway volume differences between systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients with interstitial lung disease (ILD) and those without ILD (non-ILD) using a deep learning-based approach on non-contrast chest high-resolution CT (HRCT). Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on 106 SLE patients (27 SLE-ILD, 79 SLE-non-ILD) who underwent HRCT. A customized deep learning framework based on the U-Net architecture was developed to automatically segment airway structures at the lobar and segmental levels via HRCT. Volumetric measurements of lung lobes and segments derived from the segmentations were statistically compared between the two groups using two-sample t-tests (significance threshold: p < 0.05). Results: At lobar level, significant airway volume enlargement in SLE-ILD patients was observed in the right upper lobe (p=0.009) and left upper lobe (p=0.039) compared to SLE-non-ILD. At the segmental level, significant differences were found in segments including R1 (p=0.016), R3 (p<0.001), and L3 (p=0.038), with the most marked changes in the upper lung zones, while lower zones showed non-significant trends. Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that an automated deep learning-based approach can effectively quantify airway volumes on HRCT scans and reveal significant, region-specific airway dilation in patients with SLE-ILD compared to those without ILD. The pattern of involvement, predominantly affecting the upper lobes and specific segments, highlights a distinct topographic phenotype of SLE-ILD and implicates airway structural alterations as a potential biomarker for disease presence. This AI-powered quantitative imaging biomarker holds promise for enhancing the early detection and monitoring of ILD in the SLE population, ultimately contributing to more personalized patient management.

ReactMotion: Generating Reactive Listener Motions from Speaker Utterance

In this paper, we introduce a new task, Reactive Listener Motion Generation from Speaker Utterance, which aims to generate naturalistic listener body motions that appropriately respond to a speaker's utterance. However, modeling such nonverbal listener behaviors remains underexplored and challenging due to the inherently non-deterministic nature of human reactions. To facilitate this task, we present ReactMotionNet, a large-scale dataset that pairs speaker utterances with multiple candidate listener motions annotated with varying degrees of appropriateness. This dataset design explicitly captures the one-to-many nature of listener behavior and provides supervision beyond a single ground-truth motion. Building on this dataset design, we develop preference-oriented evaluation protocols tailored to evaluate reactive appropriateness, where conventional motion metrics focusing on input-motion alignment ignore. We further propose ReactMotion, a unified generative framework that jointly models text, audio, emotion, and motion, and is trained with preference-based objectives to encourage both appropriate and diverse listener responses. Extensive experiments show that ReactMotion outperforms retrieval baselines and cascaded LLM-based pipelines, generating more natural, diverse, and appropriate listener motions.

SiMO: Single-Modality-Operable Multimodal Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception integrates multi-agent perspectives to enhance the sensing range and overcome occlusion issues. While existing multimodal approaches leverage complementary sensors to improve performance, they are highly prone to failure--especially when a key sensor like LiDAR is unavailable. The root cause is that feature fusion leads to semantic mismatches between single-modality features and the downstream modules. This paper addresses this challenge for the first time in the field of collaborative perception, introducing Single-Modality-Operable Multimodal Collaborative Perception (SiMO). By adopting the proposed Length-Adaptive Multi-Modal Fusion (LAMMA), SiMO can adaptively handle remaining modal features during modal failures while maintaining consistency of the semantic space. Additionally, leveraging the innovative "Pretrain-Align-Fuse-RD" training strategy, SiMO addresses the issue of modality competition--generally overlooked by existing methods--ensuring the independence of each individual modality branch. Experiments demonstrate that SiMO effectively aligns multimodal features while simultaneously preserving modality-specific features, enabling it to maintain optimal performance across all individual modalities. The implementation details can be found in https://github.com/dempsey-wen/SiMO.

Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought for Image Editing

Existing image editing methods struggle to perceive where to edit, especially under complex scenes and nuanced spatial instructions. To address this issue, we propose Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought (GVCoT), a unified framework that performs native visual reasoning by first generating spatial cues to localize the target region and then executing the edit. Unlike prior text-only CoT or tool-dependent visual CoT paradigms, GVCoT jointly optimizes visual tokens generated during the reasoning and editing phases in an end-to-end manner. This way fosters the emergence of innate spatial reasoning ability and enables more effective utilization of visual-domain cues. The main challenge of training GCVoT lies in the scarcity of large-scale editing data with precise edit region annotations; to this end, we construct GVCoT-Edit-Instruct, a dataset of 1.8M high-quality samples spanning 19 tasks. We adopt a progressive training strategy: supervised fine-tuning to build foundational localization ability in reasoning trace before final editing, followed by reinforcement learning to further improve reasoning and editing quality. Finally, we introduce SREdit-Bench, a new benchmark designed to comprehensively stress-test models under sophisticated scenes and fine-grained referring expressions. Experiments demonstrate that GVCoT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models on SREdit-Bench and ImgEdit. We hope our GVCoT will inspire future research toward interpretable and precise image editing.

Benchmarking Semantic Segmentation Models via Appearance and Geometry Attribute Editing

Semantic segmentation takes pivotal roles in various applications such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. When deploying segmentation models in practice, it is critical to test their behaviors in varied and complex scenes in advance. In this paper, we construct an automatic data generation pipeline Gen4Seg to stress-test semantic segmentation models by generating various challenging samples with different attribute changes. Beyond previous evaluation paradigms focusing solely on global weather and style transfer, we investigate variations in both appearance and geometry attributes at the object and image level. These include object color, material, size, position, as well as image-level variations such as weather and style. To achieve this, we propose to edit visual attributes of existing real images with precise control of structural information, empowered by diffusion models. In this way, the existing segmentation labels can be reused for the edited images, which greatly reduces the labor costs. Using our pipeline, we construct two new benchmarks, Pascal-EA and COCO-EA. We benchmark a wide variety of semantic segmentation models, spanning from closed-set models to open-vocabulary large models. We have several key findings: 1) advanced open-vocabulary models do not exhibit greater robustness compared to closed-set methods under geometric variations; 2) data augmentation techniques, such as CutOut and CutMix, are limited in enhancing robustness against appearance variations; 3) our pipeline can also be employed as a data augmentation tool and improve both in-distribution and out-of-distribution performances. Our work suggests the potential of generative models as effective tools for automatically analyzing segmentation models, and we hope our findings will assist practitioners and researchers in developing more robust and reliable segmentation models.

MTFM: A Scalable and Alignment-free Foundation Model for Industrial Recommendation in Meituan

Industrial recommendation systems typically involve multiple scenarios, yet existing cross-domain (CDR) and multi-scenario (MSR) methods often require prohibitive resources and strict input alignment, limiting their extensibility. We propose MTFM (Meituan Foundation Model for Recommendation), a transformer-based framework that addresses these challenges. Instead of pre-aligning inputs, MTFM transforms cross-domain data into heterogeneous tokens, capturing multi-scenario knowledge in an alignment-free manner. To enhance efficiency, we first introduce a multi-scenario user-level sample aggregation that significantly enhances training throughput by reducing the total number of instances. We further integrate Grouped-Query Attention and a customized Hybrid Target Attention to minimize memory usage and computational complexity. Furthermore, we implement various system-level optimizations, such as kernel fusion and the elimination of CPU-GPU blocking, to further enhance both training and inference throughput. Offline and online experiments validate the effectiveness of MTFM, demonstrating that significant performance gains are achieved by scaling both model capacity and multi-scenario training data.

Arbitrary Ratio Feature Compression via Next Token Prediction

Feature compression is increasingly important for improving the efficiency of downstream tasks, especially in applications involving large-scale or multi-modal data. While existing methods typically rely on dedicated models for achieving specific compression ratios, they are often limited in flexibility and generalization. In particular, retraining is necessary when adapting to a new compression ratio. To address this limitation, we propose a novel and flexible Arbitrary Ratio Feature Compression (ARFC) framework, which supports any compression ratio with a single model, eliminating the need for multiple specialized models. At its core, the Arbitrary Ratio Compressor (ARC) is an auto-regressive model that performs compression via next-token prediction. This allows the compression ratio to be controlled at inference simply by adjusting the number of generated tokens. To enhance the quality of the compressed features, two key modules are introduced. The Mixture of Solutions (MoS) module refines the compressed tokens by utilizing multiple compression results (solutions), reducing uncertainty and improving robustness. The Entity Relation Graph Constraint (ERGC) is integrated into the training process to preserve semantic and structural relationships during compression. Extensive experiments on cross-modal retrieval, image classification, and image retrieval tasks across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches at various compression ratios. Notably, in some cases, it even surpasses the performance of the original, uncompressed features. These results validate the effectiveness and versatility of ARFC for practical, resource-constrained scenarios.

EXaMCaP: Subset Selection with Entropy Gain Maximization for Probing Capability Gains of Large Chart Understanding Training Sets

Recent works focus on synthesizing Chart Understanding (ChartU) training sets to inject advanced chart knowledge into Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), where the sufficiency of the knowledge is typically verified by quantifying capability gains via the fine-tune-then-evaluate paradigm. However, full-set fine-tuning MLLMs to assess such gains incurs significant time costs, hindering the iterative refinement cycles of the ChartU dataset. Reviewing the ChartU dataset synthesis and data selection domains, we find that subsets can potentially probe the MLLMs' capability gains from full-set fine-tuning. Given that data diversity is vital for boosting MLLMs' performance and entropy reflects this feature, we propose EXaMCaP, which uses entropy gain maximization to select a subset. To obtain a high-diversity subset, EXaMCaP chooses the maximum-entropy subset from the large ChartU dataset. As enumerating all possible subsets is impractical, EXaMCaP iteratively selects samples to maximize the gain in set entropy relative to the current set, approximating the maximum-entropy subset of the full dataset. Experiments show that EXaMCaP outperforms baselines in probing the capability gains of the ChartU training set, along with its strong effectiveness across diverse subset sizes and compatibility with various MLLM architectures.

QVLA: Not All Channels Are Equal in Vision-Language-Action Model's Quantization

The advent of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models represents a significant leap for embodied intelligence, yet their immense computational demands critically hinder deployment on resource-constrained robotic platforms. Intuitively, low-bit quantization is a prevalent and preferred technique for large-scale model compression. However, we find that a systematic analysis of VLA model's quantization is fundamentally lacking. We argue that naively applying uniform-bit quantization from Large Language Models (LLMs) to robotics is flawed, as these methods prioritize passive data fidelity while ignoring how minor action deviations compound into catastrophic task failures. To bridge this gap, we introduce QVLA, the first action-centric quantization framework specifically designed for embodied control. In a sharp departure from the rigid, uniform-bit quantization of LLM-based methods, QVLA introduces a highly granular, channel-wise bit allocation strategy. Its core mechanism is to directly measure the final action-space sensitivity when quantizing each individual channel to various bit-widths. This process yields a precise, per-channel importance metric that guides a global optimization, which elegantly unifies quantization and pruning (0-bit) into a single, cohesive framework. Extensive evaluations on different baselines demonstrate the superiority of our approach. In the LIBERO, the quantization version of OpenVLA-OFT with our method requires only 29.2% of the original model's VRAM while maintaining 98.9% of its original performance and achieving a 1.49x speedup. This translates to a 22.6% performance improvement over the LLM-derived method SmoothQuant. Our work establishes a new, principled foundation for compressing VLA models in robotics, paving the way for deploying powerful, large-scale models on real-world hardware. Code will be released.

The Illusion of Forgetting: Attack Unlearned Diffusion via Initial Latent Variable Optimization

Although unlearning-based defenses claim to purge Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) concepts from diffusion models (DMs), we reveals that this "forgetting" is largely an illusion. Unlearning partially disrupts the mapping between linguistic symbols and the underlying knowledge, which remains intact as dormant memories. We find that the distributional discrepancy in the denoising process serves as a measurable indicator of how much of the mapping is retained, also reflecting the strength of unlearning. Inspired by this, we propose IVO (Initial Latent Variable Optimization), a concise and powerful attack framework that reactivates these dormant memories by reconstructing the broken mappings. Through Image Inversion}, Adversarial Optimization and Reused Attack, IVO optimizes initial latent variables to realign the noise distribution of unlearned models with their original unsafe states. Extensive experiments across 8 widely used unlearning techniques demonstrate that IVO achieves superior attack success rates and strong semantic consistency, exposing fundamental flaws in current defenses. The code is available at anonymous.4open.science/r/IVO/. Warning: This paper has unsafe images that may offend some readers.