FutureMind: Equipping Small Language Models with Strategic Thinking-Pattern Priors via Adaptive Knowledge Distillation

Small Language Models (SLMs) are attractive for cost-sensitive and resource-limited settings due to their efficient, low-latency inference. However, they often struggle with complex, knowledge-intensive tasks that require structured reasoning and effective retrieval. To address these limitations, we propose FutureMind, a modular reasoning framework that equips SLMs with strategic thinking-pattern priors via adaptive knowledge distillation from large language models (LLMs). FutureMind introduces a dynamic reasoning pipeline composed of four key modules: Problem Analysis, Logical Reasoning, Strategy Planning, and Retrieval Guidance. This pipeline is augmented by three distinct retrieval paradigms that decompose complex queries into tractable subproblems, ensuring efficient and accurate retrieval execution. Extensive experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks, including 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, Bamboogle, and Frames, demonstrate the superiority of FutureMind. It consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Search-o1, achieving state-of-the-art results under free training conditions across diverse SLM architectures and scales. Beyond empirical gains, our analysis reveals that the process of thinking-pattern distillation is restricted by the cognitive bias bottleneck between the teacher (LLMs) and student (SLMs) models. This provides new perspectives on the transferability of reasoning skills, paving the way for the development of SLMs that combine efficiency with genuine cognitive capability.

OpenGuanDan: A Large-Scale Imperfect Information Game Benchmark

The advancement of data-driven artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning, heavily depends on large-scale benchmarks. Despite remarkable progress across domains ranging from pattern recognition to intelligent decision-making in recent decades, exemplified by breakthroughs in board games, card games, and electronic sports games, there remains a pressing need for more challenging benchmarks to drive further research. To this end, this paper proposes OpenGuanDan, a novel benchmark that enables both efficient simulation of GuanDan (a popular four-player, multi-round Chinese card game) and comprehensive evaluation of both learning-based and rule-based GuanDan AI agents. OpenGuanDan poses a suite of nontrivial challenges, including imperfect information, large-scale information set and action spaces, a mixed learning objective involving cooperation and competition, long-horizon decision-making, variable action spaces, and dynamic team composition. These characteristics make it a demanding testbed for existing intelligent decision-making methods. Moreover, the independent API for each player allows human-AI interactions and supports integration with large language models. Empirically, we conduct two types of evaluations: (1) pairwise competitions among all GuanDan AI agents, and (2) human-AI matchups. Experimental results demonstrate that while current learning-based agents substantially outperform rule-based counterparts, they still fall short of achieving superhuman performance, underscoring the need for continued research in multi-agent intelligent decision-making domain. The project is publicly available at https://github.com/GameAI-NJUPT/OpenGuanDan.

Physiology as Language: Translating Respiration to Sleep EEG

This paper introduces a novel cross-physiology translation task: synthesizing sleep electroencephalography (EEG) from respiration signals. To address the significant complexity gap between the two modalities, we propose a waveform-conditional generative framework that preserves fine-grained respiratory dynamics while constraining the EEG target space through discrete tokenization. Trained on over 28,000 individuals, our model achieves a 7% Mean Absolute Error in EEG spectrogram reconstruction. Beyond reconstruction, the synthesized EEG supports downstream tasks with performance comparable to ground truth EEG on age estimation (MAE 5.0 vs. 5.1 years), sex detection (AUROC 0.81 vs. 0.82), and sleep staging (Accuracy 0.84 vs. 0.88), significantly outperforming baselines trained directly on breathing. Finally, we demonstrate that the framework generalizes to contactless sensing by synthesizing EEG from wireless radio-frequency reflections, highlighting the feasibility of remote, non-contact neurological assessment during sleep.

PMPBench: A Paired Multi-Modal Pan-Cancer Benchmark for Medical Image Synthesis

Contrast medium plays a pivotal role in radiological imaging, as it amplifies lesion conspicuity and improves detection for the diagnosis of tumor-related diseases. However, depending on the patient's health condition or the medical resources available, the use of contrast medium is not always feasible. Recent work has explored AI-based image translation to synthesize contrast-enhanced images directly from non-contrast scans, aims to reduce side effects and streamlines clinical workflows. Progress in this direction has been constrained by data limitations: (1) existing public datasets focus almost exclusively on brain-related paired MR modalities; (2) other collections include partially paired data but suffer from missing modalities/timestamps and imperfect spatial alignment; (3) explicit labeling of CT vs. CTC or DCE phases is often absent; (4) substantial resources remain private. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first public, fully paired, pan-cancer medical imaging dataset spanning 11 human organs. The MR data include complete dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) sequences covering all three phases (DCE1-DCE3), while the CT data provide paired non-contrast and contrast-enhanced acquisitions (CTC). The dataset is curated for anatomical correspondence, enabling rigorous evaluation of 1-to-1, N-to-1, and N-to-N translation settings (e.g., predicting DCE phases from non-contrast inputs). Built upon this resource, we establish a comprehensive benchmark. We report results from representative baselines of contemporary image-to-image translation. We release the dataset and benchmark to catalyze research on safe, effective contrast synthesis, with direct relevance to multi-organ oncology imaging workflows. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/YifanChen02/PMPBench.

Code Evolution for Control: Synthesizing Policies via LLM-Driven Evolutionary Search

Designing effective control policies for autonomous systems remains a fundamental challenge, traditionally addressed through reinforcement learning or manual engineering. While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success, it often suffers from high sample complexity, reward shaping difficulties, and produces opaque neural network policies that are hard to interpret or verify. Manual design, on the other hand, requires substantial domain expertise and struggles to scale across diverse tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that LLM-driven evolutionary search can effectively synthesize interpretable control policies in the form of executable code. By treating policy synthesis as a code evolution problem, we harness the LLM's prior knowledge of programming patterns and control heuristics while employing evolutionary search to explore the solution space systematically. We implement our approach using EvoToolkit, a framework that seamlessly integrates LLM-driven evolution with customizable fitness evaluation. Our method iteratively evolves populations of candidate policy programs, evaluating them against task-specific objectives and selecting superior individuals for reproduction. This process yields compact, human-readable control policies that can be directly inspected, modified, and formally verified. This work highlights the potential of combining foundation models with evolutionary computation for synthesizing trustworthy control policies in autonomous systems. Code is available at https://github.com/pgg3/EvoControl.

Green's-Function Spherical Neural Operators for Biological Heterogeneity

Spherical deep learning has been widely applied to a broad range of real-world problems. Existing approaches often face challenges in balancing strong spherical geometric inductive biases with the need to model real-world heterogeneity. To solve this while retaining spherical geometry, we first introduce a designable Green's function framework (DGF) to provide new spherical operator solution strategy: Design systematic Green's functions under rotational group. Based on DGF, to model biological heterogeneity, we propose Green's-Function Spherical Neural Operator (GSNO) fusing 3 operator solutions: (1) Equivariant Solution derived from Equivariant Green's Function for symmetry-consistent modeling; (2) Invariant Solution derived from Invariant Green's Function to eliminate nuisance heterogeneity, e.g., consistent background field; (3) Anisotropic Solution derived from Anisotropic Green's Function to model anisotropic systems, especially fibers with preferred direction. Therefore, the resulting model, GSNO can adapt to real-world heterogeneous systems with nuisance variability and anisotropy while retaining spectral efficiency. Evaluations on spherical MNIST, Shallow Water Equation, diffusion MRI fiber prediction, cortical parcellation and molecule structure modeling demonstrate the superiority of GSNO.

Lightweight framework for underground pipeline recognition and spatial localization based on multi-view 2D GPR images

To address the issues of weak correlation between multi-view features, low recognition accuracy of small-scale targets, and insufficient robustness in complex scenarios in underground pipeline detection using 3D GPR, this paper proposes a 3D pipeline intelligent detection framework. First, based on a B/C/D-Scan three-view joint analysis strategy, a three-dimensional pipeline three-view feature evaluation method is established by cross-validating forward simulation results obtained using FDTD methods with actual measurement data. Second, the DCO-YOLO framework is proposed, which integrates DySample, CGLU, and OutlookAttention cross-dimensional correlation mechanisms into the original YOLOv11 algorithm, significantly improving the small-scale pipeline edge feature extraction capability. Furthermore, a 3D-DIoU spatial feature matching algorithm is proposed, which integrates three-dimensional geometric constraints and center distance penalty terms to achieve automated association of multi-view annotations. The three-view fusion strategy resolves inherent ambiguities in single-view detection. Experiments based on real urban underground pipeline data show that the proposed method achieves accuracy, recall, and mean average precision of 96.2%, 93.3%, and 96.7%, respectively, in complex multi-pipeline scenarios, which are 2.0%, 2.1%, and 0.9% higher than the baseline model. Ablation experiments validated the synergistic optimization effect of the dynamic feature enhancement module and Grad-CAM++ heatmap visualization demonstrated that the improved model significantly enhanced its ability to focus on pipeline geometric features. This study integrates deep learning optimization strategies with the physical characteristics of 3D GPR, offering an efficient and reliable novel technical framework for the intelligent recognition and localization of underground pipelines.

Clustering-based Transfer Learning for Dynamic Multimodal MultiObjective Evolutionary Algorithm

Dynamic multimodal multiobjective optimization presents the dual challenge of simultaneously tracking multiple equivalent pareto optimal sets and maintaining population diversity in time-varying environments. However, existing dynamic multiobjective evolutionary algorithms often neglect solution modality, whereas static multimodal multiobjective evolutionary algorithms lack adaptability to dynamic changes. To address above challenge, this paper makes two primary contributions. First, we introduce a new benchmark suite of dynamic multimodal multiobjective test functions constructed by fusing the properties of both dynamic and multimodal optimization to establish a rigorous evaluation platform. Second, we propose a novel algorithm centered on a Clustering-based Autoencoder prediction dynamic response mechanism, which utilizes an autoencoder model to process matched clusters to generate a highly diverse initial population. Furthermore, to balance the algorithm's convergence and diversity, we integrate an adaptive niching strategy into the static optimizer. Empirical analysis on 12 instances of dynamic multimodal multiobjective test functions reveals that, compared with several state-of-the-art dynamic multiobjective evolutionary algorithms and multimodal multiobjective evolutionary algorithms, our algorithm not only preserves population diversity more effectively in the decision space but also achieves superior convergence in the objective space.

C-DGPA: Class-Centric Dual-Alignment Generative Prompt Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation transfers knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Directly deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with prompt tuning in downstream UDA tasks faces the signifi cant challenge of mitigating domain discrepancies. Existing prompt-tuning strategies primarily align marginal distribu tion, but neglect conditional distribution discrepancies, lead ing to critical issues such as class prototype misalignment and degraded semantic discriminability. To address these lim itations, the work proposes C-DGPA: Class-Centric Dual Alignment Generative Prompt Adaptation. C-DGPA syner gistically optimizes marginal distribution alignment and con ditional distribution alignment through a novel dual-branch architecture. The marginal distribution alignment branch em ploys a dynamic adversarial training framework to bridge marginal distribution discrepancies. Simultaneously, the con ditional distribution alignment branch introduces a Class Mapping Mechanism (CMM) to align conditional distribu tion discrepancies by standardizing semantic prompt under standing and preventing source domain over-reliance. This dual alignment strategy effectively integrates domain knowl edge into prompt learning via synergistic optimization, ensur ing domain-invariant and semantically discriminative repre sentations. Extensive experiments on OfficeHome, Office31, and VisDA-2017 validate the superiority of C-DGPA. It achieves new state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks.

FOD-Diff: 3D Multi-Channel Patch Diffusion Model for Fiber Orientation Distribution

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a critical non-invasive technique to estimate fiber orientation distribution (FOD) for characterizing white matter integrity. Estimating FOD from single-shell low angular resolution dMRI (LAR-FOD) is limited by accuracy, whereas estimating FOD from multi-shell high angular resolution dMRI (HAR-FOD) requires a long scanning time, which limits its applicability. Diffusion models have shown promise in estimating HAR-FOD based on LAR-FOD. However, using diffusion models to efficiently generate HAR-FOD is challenging due to the large number of spherical harmonic (SH) coefficients in FOD. Here, we propose a 3D multi-channel patch diffusion model to predict HAR-FOD from LAR-FOD. We design the FOD-patch adapter by introducing the prior brain anatomy for more efficient patch-based learning. Furthermore, we introduce a voxel-level conditional coordinating module to enhance the global understanding of the model. We design the SH attention module to effectively learn the complex correlations of the SH coefficients. Our experimental results show that our method achieves the best performance in HAR-FOD prediction and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.