TEA: Temporal Adaptive Satellite Image Semantic Segmentation

Crop mapping based on satellite images time-series (SITS) holds substantial economic value in agricultural production settings, in which parcel segmentation is an essential step. Existing approaches have achieved notable advancements in SITS segmentation with predetermined sequence lengths. However, we found that these approaches overlooked the generalization capability of models across scenarios with varying temporal length, leading to markedly poor segmentation results in such cases. To address this issue, we propose TEA, a TEmporal Adaptive SITS semantic segmentation method to enhance the model's resilience under varying sequence lengths. We introduce a teacher model that encapsulates the global sequence knowledge to guide a student model with adaptive temporal input lengths. Specifically, teacher shapes the student's feature space via intermediate embedding, prototypes and soft label perspectives to realize knowledge transfer, while dynamically aggregating student model to mitigate knowledge forgetting. Finally, we introduce full-sequence reconstruction as an auxiliary task to further enhance the quality of representations across inputs of varying temporal lengths. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method brings remarkable improvements across inputs of different temporal lengths on common benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available.

Envision: Embodied Visual Planning via Goal-Imagery Video Diffusion

Embodied visual planning aims to enable manipulation tasks by imagining how a scene evolves toward a desired goal and using the imagined trajectories to guide actions. Video diffusion models, through their image-to-video generation capability, provide a promising foundation for such visual imagination. However, existing approaches are largely forward predictive, generating trajectories conditioned on the initial observation without explicit goal modeling, thus often leading to spatial drift and goal misalignment. To address these challenges, we propose Envision, a diffusion-based framework that performs visual planning for embodied agents. By explicitly constraining the generation with a goal image, our method enforces physical plausibility and goal consistency throughout the generated trajectory. Specifically, Envision operates in two stages. First, a Goal Imagery Model identifies task-relevant regions, performs region-aware cross attention between the scene and the instruction, and synthesizes a coherent goal image that captures the desired outcome. Then, an Env-Goal Video Model, built upon a first-and-last-frame-conditioned video diffusion model (FL2V), interpolates between the initial observation and the goal image, producing smooth and physically plausible video trajectories that connect the start and goal states. Experiments on object manipulation and image editing benchmarks demonstrate that Envision achieves superior goal alignment, spatial consistency, and object preservation compared to baselines. The resulting visual plans can directly support downstream robotic planning and control, providing reliable guidance for embodied agents.

Learning from Next-Frame Prediction: Autoregressive Video Modeling Encodes Effective Representations

Recent advances in pretraining general foundation models have significantly improved performance across diverse downstream tasks. While autoregressive (AR) generative models like GPT have revolutionized NLP, most visual generative pretraining methods still rely on BERT-style masked modeling, which often disregards the temporal information essential for video analysis. The few existing autoregressive visual pretraining methods suffer from issues such as inaccurate semantic localization and poor generation quality, leading to poor semantics. In this work, we propose NExT-Vid, a novel autoregressive visual generative pretraining framework that utilizes masked next-frame prediction to jointly model images and videos. NExT-Vid introduces a context-isolated autoregressive predictor to decouple semantic representation from target decoding, and a conditioned flow-matching decoder to enhance generation quality and diversity. Through context-isolated flow-matching pretraining, our approach achieves strong representations. Extensive experiments on large-scale pretrained models demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms previous generative pretraining methods for visual representation learning via attentive probing in downstream classification.

Sum-Rate Maximization for Uplink Segmented Waveguide-Enabled Pinching-Antenna Systems

A multiuser uplink transmission framework based on the segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (SWAN) is proposed under two operating protocols: segment selection (SS) and segment aggregation (SA). For each protocol, the achievable uplink sum-rate is characterized for both time-division multiple access (TDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Low-complexity placement methods for the pinching antennas (PAs) are developed for both protocols and for both multiple-access schemes. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and show that SWAN achieves higher sum-rate performance than conventional pinching-antenna systems, while SA provides additional performance gains over SS.

Segmented Waveguide-Enabled Pinching-Antenna Systems (SWANs) for ISAC

A segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (SWAN)-assisted integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework is proposed. Unlike conventional pinching antenna systems (PASS), which use a single long waveguide, SWAN divides the waveguide into multiple short segments, each with a dedicated feed point. Thanks to the segmented structure, SWAN enhances sensing performance by significantly simplifying the reception model and reducing the in-waveguide propagation loss. To balance performance and complexity, three segment controlling protocols are proposed for the transceivers, namely i) \emph{segment selection} to select a single segment for signal transceiving, ii) \emph{segment aggregation} to aggregate signals from all segments using a single RF chain, and iii) \emph{segment multiplexing} to jointly process the signals from all segments using individual RF chains. The theoretical sensing performance limit is first analyzed for different protocols, unveiling how the sensing performance gain of SWAN scales with the number of segments. Based on this performance limit, the Pareto fronts of sensing and communication performance are characterized for the simple one-user one-target case, which is then extended to the general multi-user single-target case based on time-division multiple access (TDMA). Numerical results are presented to verify the correctness of the derivations and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, which jointly confirm the advantages of SWAN-assisted ISAC.

LLM-Aligned Geographic Item Tokenization for Local-Life Recommendation

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced text-based recommendation by enriching traditional ID-based methods with semantic generalization capabilities. Text-based methods typically encode item textual information via prompt design and generate discrete semantic IDs through item tokenization. However, in domain-specific tasks such as local-life services, simply injecting location information into prompts fails to capture fine-grained spatial characteristics and real-world distance awareness among items. To address this, we propose LGSID, an LLM-Aligned Geographic Item Tokenization Framework for Local-life Recommendation. This framework consists of two key components: (1) RL-based Geographic LLM Alignment, and (2) Hierarchical Geographic Item Tokenization. In the RL-based alignment module, we initially train a list-wise reward model to capture real-world spatial relationships among items. We then introduce a novel G-DPO algorithm that uses pre-trained reward model to inject generalized spatial knowledge and collaborative signals into LLMs while preserving their semantic understanding. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical geographic item tokenization strategy, where primary tokens are derived from discrete spatial and content attributes, and residual tokens are refined using the aligned LLM's geographic representation vectors. Extensive experiments on real-world Kuaishou industry datasets show that LGSID consistently outperforms state-of-the-art discriminative and generative recommendation models. Ablation studies, visualizations, and case studies further validate its effectiveness.

A Plug-and-Play Spatially-Constrained Representation Enhancement Framework for Local-Life Recommendation

Local-life recommendation have witnessed rapid growth, providing users with convenient access to daily essentials. However, this domain faces two key challenges: (1) spatial constraints, driven by the requirements of the local-life scenario, where items are usually shown only to users within a limited geographic area, indirectly reducing their exposure probability; and (2) long-tail sparsity, where few popular items dominate user interactions, while many high-quality long-tail items are largely overlooked due to imbalanced interaction opportunities. Existing methods typically adopt a user-centric perspective, such as modeling spatial user preferences or enhancing long-tail representations with collaborative filtering signals. However, we argue that an item-centric perspective is more suitable for this domain, focusing on enhancing long-tail items representation that align with the spatially-constrained characteristics of local lifestyle services. To tackle this issue, we propose ReST, a Plug-And-Play Spatially-Constrained Representation Enhancement Framework for Long-Tail Local-Life Recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce a Meta ID Warm-up Network, which initializes fundamental ID representations by injecting their basic attribute-level semantic information. Subsequently, we propose a novel Spatially-Constrained ID Representation Enhancement Network (SIDENet) based on contrastive learning, which incorporates two efficient strategies: a spatially-constrained hard sampling strategy and a dynamic representation alignment strategy. This design adaptively identifies weak ID representations based on their attribute-level information during training. It additionally enhances them by capturing latent item relationships within the spatially-constrained characteristics of local lifestyle services, while preserving compatibility with popular items.

Agentmandering: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Fair Redistricting via Large Language Model Agents

Redistricting plays a central role in shaping how votes are translated into political power. While existing computational methods primarily aim to generate large ensembles of legally valid districting plans, they often neglect the strategic dynamics involved in the selection process. This oversight creates opportunities for partisan actors to cherry-pick maps that, while technically compliant, are politically advantageous. Simply satisfying formal constraints does not ensure fairness when the selection process itself can be manipulated. We propose \textbf{Agentmandering}, a framework that reimagines redistricting as a turn-based negotiation between two agents representing opposing political interests. Drawing inspiration from game-theoretic ideas, particularly the \textit{Choose-and-Freeze} protocol, our method embeds strategic interaction into the redistricting process via large language model (LLM) agents. Agents alternate between selecting and freezing districts from a small set of candidate maps, gradually partitioning the state through constrained and interpretable choices. Evaluation on post-2020 U.S. Census data across all states shows that Agentmandering significantly reduces partisan bias and unfairness, while achieving 2 to 3 orders of magnitude lower variance than standard baselines. These results demonstrate both fairness and stability, especially in swing-state scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lihaogx/AgentMandering.

Polymap: generating high definition map based on rasterized polygons

The perception of high-definition maps is an integral component of environmental perception in autonomous driving systems. Existing research have often focused on online construction of high-definition maps. For instance, the Maptr[9] series employ a detection-based method to output vectorized map instances parallelly in an end-to-end manner. However, despite their capability for real-time construction, detection-based methods are observed to lack robust generalizability[19], which hampers their applicability in auto-labeling systems. Therefore, aiming to improve the generalizability, we reinterpret road elements as rasterized polygons and design a concise framework based on instance segmentation. Initially, a segmentation-based transformer is employed to deliver instance masks in an end-to-end manner; succeeding this step, a Potrace-based[17] post-processing module is used to ultimately yield vectorized map elements. Quantitative results attained on the Nuscene[1] dataset substantiate the effectiveness and generaliz-ability of our method.

Blind MIMO Semantic Communication via Parallel Variational Diffusion: A Completely Pilot-Free Approach

In this paper, we propose a novel blind multi-input multi-output (MIMO) semantic communication (SC) framework named Blind-MIMOSC that consists of a deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC) transmitter and a diffusion-based blind receiver. The DJSCC transmitter aims to compress and map the source data into the transmitted signal by exploiting the structural characteristics of the source data, while the diffusion-based blind receiver employs a parallel variational diffusion (PVD) model to simultaneously recover the channel and the source data from the received signal without using any pilots. The PVD model leverages two pre-trained score networks to characterize the prior information of the channel and the source data, operating in a plug-and-play manner during inference. This design allows only the affected network to be retrained when channel conditions or source datasets change, avoiding the complicated full-network retraining required by end-to-end methods. This work presents the first fully pilot-free solution for joint channel estimation and source recovery in block-fading MIMO systems. Extensive experiments show that Blind-MIMOSC with PVD achieves superior channel and source recovery accuracy compared to state-of-the-art approaches, with drastically reduced channel bandwidth ratio.