Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with SlowFast: The Three Golden Principles

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs by enabling parallel token generation and significantly reducing inference latency. However, existing sampling strategies for dLLMs, such as confidence-based or semi-autoregressive decoding, often suffer from static behavior, leading to suboptimal efficiency and limited flexibility. In this paper, we propose SlowFast Sampling, a novel dynamic sampling strategy that adaptively alternates between exploratory and accelerated decoding stages. Our method is guided by three golden principles: certainty principle, convergence principle, and positional principle, which govern when and where tokens can be confidently and efficiently decoded. We further integrate our strategy with dLLM-Cache to reduce redundant computation. Extensive experiments across benchmarks and models show that SlowFast Sampling achieves up to 15.63$\times$ speedup on LLaDA with minimal accuracy drop, and up to 34.22$\times$ when combined with caching. Notably, our approach outperforms strong autoregressive baselines like LLaMA3 8B in throughput, demonstrating that well-designed sampling can unlock the full potential of dLLMs for fast and high-quality generation.

Alita: Generalist Agent Enabling Scalable Agentic Reasoning with Minimal Predefinition and Maximal Self-Evolution

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to autonomously perform complex, open-ended tasks. However, many existing frameworks depend heavily on manually predefined tools and workflows, which hinder their adaptability, scalability, and generalization across domains. In this work, we introduce Alita--a generalist agent designed with the principle of "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication," enabling scalable agentic reasoning through minimal predefinition and maximal self-evolution. For minimal predefinition, Alita is equipped with only one component for direct problem-solving, making it much simpler and neater than previous approaches that relied heavily on hand-crafted, elaborate tools and workflows. This clean design enhances its potential to generalize to challenging questions, without being limited by tools. For Maximal self-evolution, we enable the creativity of Alita by providing a suite of general-purpose components to autonomously construct, refine, and reuse external capabilities by generating task-related model context protocols (MCPs) from open source, which contributes to scalable agentic reasoning. Notably, Alita achieves 75.15% pass@1 and 87.27% pass@3 accuracy, which is top-ranking among general-purpose agents, on the GAIA benchmark validation dataset, 74.00% and 52.00% pass@1, respectively, on Mathvista and PathVQA, outperforming many agent systems with far greater complexity. More details will be updated at $\href{https://github.com/CharlesQ9/Alita}{https://github.com/CharlesQ9/Alita}$.

Benchmarking Multimodal Knowledge Conflict for Large Multimodal Models

Large Multimodal Models(LMMs) face notable challenges when encountering multimodal knowledge conflicts, particularly under retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) frameworks where the contextual information from external sources may contradict the model's internal parametric knowledge, leading to unreliable outputs. However, existing benchmarks fail to reflect such realistic conflict scenarios. Most focus solely on intra-memory conflicts, while context-memory and inter-context conflicts remain largely investigated. Furthermore, commonly used factual knowledge-based evaluations are often overlooked, and existing datasets lack a thorough investigation into conflict detection capabilities. To bridge this gap, we propose MMKC-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate factual knowledge conflicts in both context-memory and inter-context scenarios. MMKC-Bench encompasses three types of multimodal knowledge conflicts and includes 1,573 knowledge instances and 3,381 images across 23 broad types, collected through automated pipelines with human verification. We evaluate three representative series of LMMs on both model behavior analysis and conflict detection tasks. Our findings show that while current LMMs are capable of recognizing knowledge conflicts, they tend to favor internal parametric knowledge over external evidence. We hope MMKC-Bench will foster further research in multimodal knowledge conflict and enhance the development of multimodal RAG systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/MLLMKCBENCH/MLLMKC.

A Survey of Efficient Reasoning for Large Reasoning Models: Language, Multimodality, and Beyond

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1, have demonstrated strong performance gains by scaling up the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning during inference. However, a growing concern lies in their tendency to produce excessively long reasoning traces, which are often filled with redundant content (e.g., repeated definitions), over-analysis of simple problems, and superficial exploration of multiple reasoning paths for harder tasks. This inefficiency introduces significant challenges for training, inference, and real-world deployment (e.g., in agent-based systems), where token economy is critical. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of recent efforts aimed at improving reasoning efficiency in LRMs, with a particular focus on the unique challenges that arise in this new paradigm. We identify common patterns of inefficiency, examine methods proposed across the LRM lifecycle, i.e., from pretraining to inference, and discuss promising future directions for research. To support ongoing development, we also maintain a real-time GitHub repository tracking recent progress in the field. We hope this survey serves as a foundation for further exploration and inspires innovation in this rapidly evolving area.

Learning A Zero-shot Occupancy Network from Vision Foundation Models via Self-supervised Adaptation

Estimating the 3D world from 2D monocular images is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the labour-intensive nature of 3D annotations. To simplify label acquisition, this work proposes a novel approach that bridges 2D vision foundation models (VFMs) with 3D tasks by decoupling 3D supervision into an ensemble of image-level primitives, e.g., semantic and geometric components. As a key motivator, we leverage the zero-shot capabilities of vision-language models for image semantics. However, due to the notorious ill-posed problem - multiple distinct 3D scenes can produce identical 2D projections, directly inferring metric depth from a monocular image in a zero-shot manner is unsuitable. In contrast, 2D VFMs provide promising sources of relative depth, which theoretically aligns with metric depth when properly scaled and offset. Thus, we adapt the relative depth derived from VFMs into metric depth by optimising the scale and offset using temporal consistency, also known as novel view synthesis, without access to ground-truth metric depth. Consequently, we project the semantics into 3D space using the reconstructed metric depth, thereby providing 3D supervision. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. For instance, the proposed method surpasses the current state-of-the-art by 3.34% mIoU on nuScenes for voxel occupancy prediction.

LED-Merging: Mitigating Safety-Utility Conflicts in Model Merging with Location-Election-Disjoint

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized tasks incurs substantial computational and data costs. While model merging offers a training-free solution to integrate multiple task-specific models, existing methods suffer from safety-utility conflicts where enhanced general capabilities degrade safety safeguards. We identify two root causes: \textbf{neuron misidentification} due to simplistic parameter magnitude-based selection, and \textbf{cross-task neuron interference} during merging. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{LED-Merging}, a three-stage framework that \textbf{L}ocates task-specific neurons via gradient-based attribution, dynamically \textbf{E}lects critical neurons through multi-model importance fusion, and \textbf{D}isjoints conflicting updates through parameter isolation. Extensive experiments on Llama-3-8B, Mistral-7B, and Llama2-13B demonstrate that LED-Merging reduces harmful response rates(\emph{e.g.}, a 31.4\% decrease on Llama-3-8B-Instruct on HarmBench) while preserving 95\% of utility performance(\emph{e.g.}, 52.39\% accuracy on GSM8K). LED-Merging resolves safety-utility conflicts and provides a lightweight, training-free paradigm for constructing reliable multi-task LLMs.

SEER: Self-Explainability Enhancement of Large Language Models' Representations

Explaining the hidden representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a perspective to understand LLMs' underlying inference logic and improve their reliability in application scenarios. However, previous methods introduce external ''black-box'' modules to explain ''black-box'' LLMs, increasing the potential uncertainty and failing to provide faithful explanations. In this paper, we propose a self-explaining method SEER, enhancing LLMs' explainability by aggregating the same concept and disentangling the different concepts in the representation space. In this way, SEER provides faithful explanations carried by representations synchronously with the LLMs' output. Additionally, we showcase the applications of SEER on trustworthiness-related tasks (e.g., the safety risks classification and detoxification tasks), where self-explained LLMs achieve consistent improvement in explainability and performance. More crucially, we theoretically analyze the improvement of SEER on LLMs' generalization ability through optimal transport theory.

Explainable and Interpretable Multimodal Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized numerous fields, with large language models (LLMs) and computer vision (CV) systems driving advancements in natural language understanding and visual processing, respectively. The convergence of these technologies has catalyzed the rise of multimodal AI, enabling richer, cross-modal understanding that spans text, vision, audio, and video modalities. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), in particular, have emerged as a powerful framework, demonstrating impressive capabilities in tasks like image-text generation, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite these advancements, the complexity and scale of MLLMs introduce significant challenges in interpretability and explainability, essential for establishing transparency, trustworthiness, and reliability in high-stakes applications. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the interpretability and explainability of MLLMs, proposing a novel framework that categorizes existing research across three perspectives: (I) Data, (II) Model, (III) Training \& Inference. We systematically analyze interpretability from token-level to embedding-level representations, assess approaches related to both architecture analysis and design, and explore training and inference strategies that enhance transparency. By comparing various methodologies, we identify their strengths and limitations and propose future research directions to address unresolved challenges in multimodal explainability. This survey offers a foundational resource for advancing interpretability and transparency in MLLMs, guiding researchers and practitioners toward developing more accountable and robust multimodal AI systems.

VLSBench: Unveiling Visual Leakage in Multimodal Safety

Safety concerns of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gradually become an important problem in various applications. Surprisingly, previous works indicate a counter-intuitive phenomenon that using textual unlearning to align MLLMs achieves comparable safety performances with MLLMs trained with image-text pairs. To explain such a counter-intuitive phenomenon, we discover a visual safety information leakage (VSIL) problem in existing multimodal safety benchmarks, i.e., the potentially risky and sensitive content in the image has been revealed in the textual query. In this way, MLLMs can easily refuse these sensitive text-image queries according to textual queries. However, image-text pairs without VSIL are common in real-world scenarios and are overlooked by existing multimodal safety benchmarks. To this end, we construct multimodal visual leakless safety benchmark (VLSBench) preventing visual safety leakage from image to textual query with 2.4k image-text pairs. Experimental results indicate that VLSBench poses a significant challenge to both open-source and close-source MLLMs, including LLaVA, Qwen2-VL, Llama3.2-Vision, and GPT-4o. This study demonstrates that textual alignment is enough for multimodal safety scenarios with VSIL, while multimodal alignment is a more promising solution for multimodal safety scenarios without VSIL. Please see our code and data at: http://hxhcreate.github.io/VLSBench

DEAN: Deactivating the Coupled Neurons to Mitigate Fairness-Privacy Conflicts in Large Language Models

Ensuring awareness of fairness and privacy in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical. Interestingly, we discover a counter-intuitive trade-off phenomenon that enhancing an LLM's privacy awareness through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) methods significantly decreases its fairness awareness with thousands of samples. To address this issue, inspired by the information theory, we introduce a training-free method to \textbf{DEA}ctivate the fairness and privacy coupled \textbf{N}eurons (\textbf{DEAN}), which theoretically and empirically decrease the mutual information between fairness and privacy awareness. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DEAN eliminates the trade-off phenomenon and significantly improves LLMs' fairness and privacy awareness simultaneously, \eg improving Qwen-2-7B-Instruct's fairness awareness by 12.2\% and privacy awareness by 14.0\%. More crucially, DEAN remains robust and effective with limited annotated data or even when only malicious fine-tuning data is available, whereas SFT methods may fail to perform properly in such scenarios. We hope this study provides valuable insights into concurrently addressing fairness and privacy concerns in LLMs and can be integrated into comprehensive frameworks to develop more ethical and responsible AI systems. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ChnQ/DEAN}.