Repurposing Adversarial Perturbations for Continual Learning: From Defense to Active Alignment

In dynamic environments, large language models need to keep adapting to new tasks, but continual learning often suffers from forgetting, limited transfer, and vulnerability to adversarial perturbations. To address this, we present AdvCL, which repurposes adversarial perturbations as a geometric control signal for stable continual adaptation. AdvCL combines three plug-in modules: Intra-Smooth promotes local smoothness via small adversarial perturbations; Proto-Clip uses similarity clipping to prevent excessive alignment to current task prototype; and Inter-Align applies directional alignment toward previous task prototype to reduce representational gaps. Experiments show consistent gains in both standard performance and robustness, with lower forgetting and stronger transfer. We further analyze key mechanisms by quantifying the sensitivity of Intra-Smooth to perturbation settings and the effect of Inter-Align on task similarity and geometric distance. In summary, the modules provide complementary gains when combined, and each can also be integrated individually into diverse CL paradigms, including replay, regularization, and dynamic architectures, thereby offering a geometric control mechanism for continual learning.

Where to Refine, When to Stop: Rethinking Redundancy via Latent Discrepancy for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Generation

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models deliver high-quality image generation but suffer from significant inference latency at high resolutions. Recent acceleration approaches most rely on heuristic measures with layer features to prune tokens. Such heuristics are sensitive to complex contextual semantics, leading to inaccurate identification of redundant computation and poor adaptability across prompts. We rethink redundancy in VAR from the perspective of its impact on pixel-space generation and introduce Latent Discrepancy. This unified metric quantifies a token's contribution by measuring the change in model states during generation. Our analysis shows that redundancy is more accurately identified when guided by image latent or pixel-space signals. We further observed that in classifier-free guidance (CFG), the convergence trend of the discrepancy between conditional and unconditional branches exhibits high dynamics with different prompts. Based on these findings, we propose LD-Pruning (Latent Discrepancy Pruning), a training-free framework that removes redundancy via latent discrepancy by integrating decoding-free region selection and adaptive unconditional-branch skipping. Extensive experiments show that LD-Pruning substantially reduces inference latency while maintaining high generation quality, achieving up to 2.35x speedup on Infinity-8B.

Knowledge-to-Verification: Exploring RLVR for LLMs in Knowledge-Intensive Domains

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated promising potential to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in domains such as mathematics and coding. However, its applications on knowledge-intensive domains have not been effectively explored due to the scarcity of high-quality verifiable data. Furthermore, current RLVR focuses solely on the correctness of final answers, leading to the limitations of flawed reasoning and sparse reward signals. In this work, we propose Knowledge-to-Verification (K2V), a framework that extends RLVR to knowledge-intensive domains through automated verifiable data synthesis, while enabling verification of the LLM's reasoning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that K2V enhances the reasoning of LLM in knowledge-intensive domains without significantly compromising the model's general capabilities. This study also suggests that integrating automated data synthesis with reasoning verification is a promising direction to enhance model capabilities in these broader domains. Code is available at https://github.com/SeedScientist/K2V.

Memory-Efficient Continual Learning with CLIP Models

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models excel at understanding image-text relationships but struggle with adapting to new data without forgetting prior knowledge. To address this, models are typically fine-tuned using both new task data and a memory buffer of past tasks. However, CLIP's contrastive loss suffers when the memory buffer is small, leading to performance degradation on previous tasks. We propose a memory-efficient, distributionally robust method that dynamically reweights losses per class during training. Our approach, tested on class incremental settings (CIFAR-100, ImageNet1K) and a domain incremental setting (DomainNet) adapts CLIP models quickly while minimizing catastrophic forgetting, even with minimal memory usage.

Multi-fidelity surrogates for mechanics of composites: from co-kriging to multi-fidelity neural networks

Composite materials exhibit strongly hierarchical and anisotropic properties governed by coupled mechanisms spanning constituents, plies, laminates, structures, and manufacturing history. This intrinsic complexity makes predictive modeling of composites expensive, because repeated experiments and high-fidelity simulations are needed to cover large design spaces of material, structure, and manufacturing. Multi-fidelity surrogate modeling addresses this challenge by combining abundant, less expensive data with limited high-accuracy data to recover reliable high-fidelity predictions. This review presents a structured overview of multi-fidelity modeling for composite mechanics, covering Gaussian-process or Kriging-based methods, including co-Kriging, coregionalization models, autoregressive formulations, nonlinear autoregressive Gaussian processes, multi-fidelity deep Gaussian processes, and multi-fidelity neural networks. Their distinctions are examined in terms of cross-fidelity correlation, discrepancy representation, uncertainty quantification, and scalability. Selected examples of their applications to composites are introduced according to the roles that multi-fidelity surrogates play in engineering problems, including forward prediction for rapid exploration of material design spaces, inverse optimization for composite parameter identification and design search under limited high-fidelity access, and workflow integration, where heterogeneous data sources, constraints, and validation requirements determine model utility. Open question discussions highlight recurring challenges specific to composites, such as regime-dependent fidelity gaps associated with nonlinear damage and manufacturing history, mismatches between simulations and experiments, and uncertainty propagation across multi-fidelity models.

ReSS: Learning Reasoning Models for Tabular Data Prediction via Symbolic Scaffold

Tabular data remains prevalent in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance, where predictive models are expected to provide both high accuracy and faithful, human-understandable reasoning. While symbolic models offer verifiable logic, they lack semantic expressiveness. Meanwhile, general-purpose LLMs often require specialized fine-tuning to master domain-specific tabular reasoning. To address the dual challenges of scalable data curation and reasoning consistency, we propose ReSS, a systematic framework that bridges symbolic and neural reasoning models. ReSS leverages a decision-tree model to extract instance-level decision paths as symbolic scaffolds. These scaffolds, alongside input features and labels, guide an LLM to generate grounded natural-language reasoning that strictly adheres to the underlying decision logic. The resulting high-quality dataset is used to fine-tune a pretrained LLM into a specialized tabular reasoning model, further enhanced by a scaffold-invariant data augmentation strategy to improve generalization and explainability. To rigorously assess faithfulness, we introduce quantitative metrics including hallucination rate, explanation necessity, and explanation sufficiency. Experimental results on medical and financial benchmarks demonstrate that ReSS-trained models improve traditional decision trees and standard fine-tuning approaches up to $10\%$ while producing faithful and consistent reasoning

Route-Induced Density and Stability (RIDE): Controlled Intervention and Mechanism Analysis of Routing-Style Meta Prompts on LLM Internal States

Routing is widely used to scale large language models, from Mixture-of-Experts gating to multi-model/tool selection. A common belief is that routing to a task ``expert'' activates sparser internal computation and thus yields more certain and stable outputs (the Sparsity--Certainty Hypothesis). We test this belief by injecting routing-style meta prompts as a textual proxy for routing signals in front of frozen instruction-tuned LLMs. We quantify (C1) internal density via activation sparsity, (C2) domain-keyword attention, and (C3) output stability via predictive entropy and semantic variation. On a RouterEval subset with three instruction-tuned models (Qwen3-8B, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2), meta prompts consistently densify early/middle-layer representations rather than increasing sparsity; natural-language expert instructions are often stronger than structured tags. Attention responses are heterogeneous: Qwen/Llama reduce keyword attention, while Mistral reinforces it. Finally, the densification--stability link is weak and appears only in Qwen, with near-zero correlations in Llama and Mistral. We present RIDE as a diagnostic probe for calibrating routing design and uncertainty estimation.

ACAVCaps: Enabling large-scale training for fine-grained and diverse audio understanding

General audio understanding is a fundamental goal for large audio-language models, with audio captioning serving as a cornerstone task for their development. However, progress in this domain is hindered by existing datasets, which lack the scale and descriptive granularity required to train truly versatile models. To address this gap, we introduce ACAVCaps, a new large-scale, fine-grained, and multi-faceted audio captioning dataset. Derived from the ACAV100M collection, ACAVCaps is constructed using a multi-expert pipeline that analyzes audio from diverse perspectives-including speech, music, and acoustic properties-which are then synthesized into rich, detailed descriptions by a large language model. Experimental results demonstrate that models pre-trained on ACAVCaps exhibit substantially stronger generalization capabilities on various downstream tasks compared to those trained on other leading captioning datasets. The dataset is available at https://github.com/xiaomi-research/acavcaps.

Back to Point: Exploring Point-Language Models for Zero-Shot 3D Anomaly Detection

Zero-shot (ZS) 3D anomaly detection is crucial for reliable industrial inspection, as it enables detecting and localizing defects without requiring any target-category training data. Existing approaches render 3D point clouds into 2D images and leverage pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for anomaly detection. However, such strategies inevitably discard geometric details and exhibit limited sensitivity to local anomalies. In this paper, we revisit intrinsic 3D representations and explore the potential of pre-trained Point-Language Models (PLMs) for ZS 3D anomaly detection. We propose BTP (Back To Point), a novel framework that effectively aligns 3D point cloud and textual embeddings. Specifically, BTP aligns multi-granularity patch features with textual representations for localized anomaly detection, while incorporating geometric descriptors to enhance sensitivity to structural anomalies. Furthermore, we introduce a joint representation learning strategy that leverages auxiliary point cloud data to improve robustness and enrich anomaly semantics. Extensive experiments on Real3D-AD and Anomaly-ShapeNet demonstrate that BTP achieves superior performance in ZS 3D anomaly detection. Code will be available at \href{https://github.com/wistful-8029/BTP-3DAD}{https://github.com/wistful-8029/BTP-3DAD}.

Exploring Multimodal Prompts For Unsupervised Continuous Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised Continuous Anomaly Detection (UCAD) is gaining attention for effectively addressing the catastrophic forgetting and heavy computational burden issues in traditional Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD). However, existing UCAD approaches that rely solely on visual information are insufficient to capture the manifold of normality in complex scenes, thereby impeding further gains in anomaly detection accuracy. To overcome this limitation, we propose an unsupervised continual anomaly detection framework grounded in multimodal prompting. Specifically, we introduce a Continual Multimodal Prompt Memory Bank (CMPMB) that progressively distills and retains prototypical normal patterns from both visual and textual domains across consecutive tasks, yielding a richer representation of normality. Furthermore, we devise a Defect-Semantic-Guided Adaptive Fusion Mechanism (DSG-AFM) that integrates an Adaptive Normalization Module (ANM) with a Dynamic Fusion Strategy (DFS) to jointly enhance detection accuracy and adversarial robustness. Benchmark experiments on MVTec AD and VisA datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on image-level AUROC and pixel-level AUPR metrics.