STO-RL: Offline RL under Sparse Rewards via LLM-Guided Subgoal Temporal Order

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from pre-collected datasets, avoiding costly and risky online interactions, but it often struggles with long-horizon tasks involving sparse rewards. Existing goal-conditioned and hierarchical offline RL methods decompose such tasks and generate intermediate rewards to mitigate limitations of traditional offline RL, but usually overlook temporal dependencies among subgoals and rely on imprecise reward shaping, leading to suboptimal policies. To address these issues, we propose STO-RL (Offline RL using LLM-Guided Subgoal Temporal Order), an offline RL framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate temporally ordered subgoal sequences and corresponding state-to-subgoal-stage mappings. Using this temporal structure, STO-RL applies potential-based reward shaping to transform sparse terminal rewards into dense, temporally consistent signals, promoting subgoal progress while avoiding suboptimal solutions. The resulting augmented dataset with shaped rewards enables efficient offline training of high-performing policies. Evaluations on four discrete and continuous sparse-reward benchmarks demonstrate that STO-RL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art offline goal-conditioned and hierarchical RL baselines, achieving faster convergence, higher success rates, and shorter trajectories. Ablation studies further confirm STO-RL's robustness to imperfect or noisy LLM-generated subgoal sequences, demonstrating that LLM-guided subgoal temporal structures combined with theoretically grounded reward shaping provide a practical and scalable solution for long-horizon offline RL.

Anti-Length Shift: Dynamic Outlier Truncation for Training Efficient Reasoning Models

Large reasoning models enhanced by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards have achieved significant performance gains by extending their chain-of-thought. However, this paradigm incurs substantial deployment costs as models often exhibit excessive verbosity on simple queries. Existing efficient reasoning methods relying on explicit length penalties often introduce optimization conflicts and leave the generative mechanisms driving overthinking largely unexamined. In this paper, we identify a phenomenon termed length shift where models increasingly generate unnecessary reasoning on trivial inputs during training. To address this, we introduce Dynamic Outlier Truncation (DOT), a training-time intervention that selectively suppresses redundant tokens. This method targets only the extreme tail of response lengths within fully correct rollout groups while preserving long-horizon reasoning capabilities for complex problems. To complement this intervention and ensure stable convergence, we further incorporate auxiliary KL regularization and predictive dynamic sampling. Experimental results across multiple model scales demonstrate that our approach significantly pushes the efficiency-performance Pareto frontier outward. Notably, on the AIME-24, our method reduces inference token usage by 78% while simultaneously increasing accuracy compared to the initial policy and surpassing state-of-the-art efficient reasoning methods.

Controllable Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have garnered much attention for their ability to elucidate the prediction process through a human-understandable concept layer. However, most previous studies focused on static scenarios where the data and concepts are assumed to be fixed and clean. In real-world applications, deployed models require continuous maintenance: we often need to remove erroneous or sensitive data (unlearning), correct mislabeled concepts, or incorporate newly acquired samples (incremental learning) to adapt to evolving environments. Thus, deriving efficient editable CBMs without retraining from scratch remains a significant challenge, particularly in large-scale applications. To address these challenges, we propose Controllable Concept Bottleneck Models (CCBMs). Specifically, CCBMs support three granularities of model editing: concept-label-level, concept-level, and data-level, the latter of which encompasses both data removal and data addition. CCBMs enjoy mathematically rigorous closed-form approximations derived from influence functions that obviate the need for retraining. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and adaptability of our CCBMs, affirming their practical value in enabling dynamic and trustworthy CBMs.

Wavelet-based Multi-View Fusion of 4D Radar Tensor and Camera for Robust 3D Object Detection

4D millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar has been widely adopted in autonomous driving and robot perception due to its low cost and all-weather robustness. However, its inherent sparsity and limited semantic richness significantly constrain perception capability. Recently, fusing camera data with 4D radar has emerged as a promising cost effective solution, by exploiting the complementary strengths of the two modalities. Nevertheless, point-cloud-based radar often suffer from information loss introduced by multi-stage signal processing, while directly utilizing raw 4D radar data incurs prohibitive computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose WRCFormer, a novel 3D object detection framework that fuses raw radar cubes with camera inputs via multi-view representations of the decoupled radar cube. Specifically, we design a Wavelet Attention Module as the basic module of wavelet-based Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) to enhance the representation of sparse radar signals and image data. We further introduce a two-stage query-based, modality-agnostic fusion mechanism termed Geometry-guided Progressive Fusion to efficiently integrate multi-view features from both modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WRCFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the K-Radar benchmarks, surpassing the best model by approximately 2.4% in all scenarios and 1.6% in the sleet scenario, highlighting its robustness under adverse weather conditions.

AmPLe: Supporting Vision-Language Models via Adaptive-Debiased Ensemble Multi-Prompt Learning

Multi-prompt learning methods have emerged as an effective approach for facilitating the rapid adaptation of vision-language models to downstream tasks with limited resources. Existing multi-prompt learning methods primarily focus on utilizing various meticulously designed prompts within a single foundation vision-language model to achieve superior performance. However, the overlooked model-prompt matching bias hinders the development of multi-prompt learning, i.e., the same prompt can convey different semantics across distinct vision-language models, such as CLIP-ViT-B/16 and CLIP-ViT-B/32, resulting in inconsistent predictions of identical prompt. To mitigate the impact of this bias on downstream tasks, we explore an ensemble learning approach to sufficiently aggregate the benefits of diverse predictions. Additionally, we further disclose the presence of sample-prompt matching bias, which originates from the prompt-irrelevant semantics encapsulated in the input samples. Thus, directly utilizing all information from the input samples for generating weights of ensemble learning can lead to suboptimal performance. In response, we extract prompt-relevant semantics from input samples by leveraging the guidance of the information theory-based analysis, adaptively calculating debiased ensemble weights. Overall, we propose Adaptive-Debiased Ensemble MultiPrompt Learning, abbreviated as AmPLe, to mitigate the two types of bias simultaneously. Extensive experiments on three representative tasks, i.e., generalization to novel classes, new target datasets, and unseen domain shifts, show that AmPLe can widely outperform existing methods. Theoretical validation from a causal perspective further supports the effectiveness of AmPLe.

Beyond a Single Light: A Large-Scale Aerial Dataset for Urban Scene Reconstruction Under Varying Illumination

Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have demonstrated strong potential for large-scale UAV-based 3D reconstruction tasks by fitting the appearance of images. However, real-world large-scale captures are often based on multi-temporal data capture, where illumination inconsistencies across different times of day can significantly lead to color artifacts, geometric inaccuracies, and inconsistent appearance. Due to the lack of UAV datasets that systematically capture the same areas under varying illumination conditions, this challenge remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduceSkyLume, a large-scale, real-world UAV dataset specifically designed for studying illumination robust 3D reconstruction in urban scene modeling: (1) We collect data from 10 urban regions data comprising more than 100k high resolution UAV images (four oblique views and nadir), where each region is captured at three periods of the day to systematically isolate illumination changes. (2) To support precise evaluation of geometry and appearance, we provide per-scene LiDAR scans and accurate 3D ground-truth for assessing depth, surface normals, and reconstruction quality under varying illumination. (3) For the inverse rendering task, we introduce the Temporal Consistency Coefficient (TCC), a metric that measuress cross-time albedo stability and directly evaluates the robustness of the disentanglement of light and material. We aim for this resource to serve as a foundation that advances research and real-world evaluation in large-scale inverse rendering, geometry reconstruction, and novel view synthesis.

Enhancing Conversational Recommender Systems with Tree-Structured Knowledge and Pretrained Language Models

Recent advances in pretrained language models (PLMs) have significantly improved conversational recommender systems (CRS), enabling more fluent and context-aware interactions. To further enhance accuracy and mitigate hallucination, many methods integrate PLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs), but face key challenges: failing to fully exploit PLM reasoning over graph relationships, indiscriminately incorporating retrieved knowledge without context filtering, and neglecting collaborative preferences in multi-turn dialogues. To this end, we propose PCRS-TKA, a prompt-based framework employing retrieval-augmented generation to integrate PLMs with KGs. PCRS-TKA constructs dialogue-specific knowledge trees from KGs and serializes them into texts, enabling structure-aware reasoning while capturing rich entity semantics. Our approach selectively filters context-relevant knowledge and explicitly models collaborative preferences using specialized supervision signals. A semantic alignment module harmonizes heterogeneous inputs, reducing noise and enhancing accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PCRS-TKA consistently outperforms all baselines in both recommendation and conversational quality.

From Events to Clarity: The Event-Guided Diffusion Framework for Dehazing

Clear imaging under hazy conditions is a critical task. Prior-based and neural methods have improved results. However, they operate on RGB frames, which suffer from limited dynamic range. Therefore, dehazing remains ill-posed and can erase structure and illumination details. To address this, we use event cameras for dehazing for the \textbf{first time}. Event cameras offer much higher HDR ($120 dBvs.60 dB$) and microsecond latency, therefore they suit hazy scenes. In practice, transferring HDR cues from events to frames is hard because real paired data are scarce. To tackle this, we propose an event-guided diffusion model that utilizes the strong generative priors of diffusion models to reconstruct clear images from hazy inputs by effectively transferring HDR information from events. Specifically, we design an event-guided module that maps sparse HDR event features, \textit{e.g.,} edges, corners, into the diffusion latent space. This clear conditioning provides precise structural guidance during generation, improves visual realism, and reduces semantic drift. For real-world evaluation, we collect a drone dataset in heavy haze (AQI = 341) with synchronized RGB and event sensors. Experiments on two benchmarks and our dataset achieve state-of-the-art results.

Beyond Boundaries: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models for Source-Free Object Detection

Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) aims to adapt a source-pretrained object detector to a target domain without access to source data. However, existing SFOD methods predominantly rely on internal knowledge from the source model, which limits their capacity to generalize across domains and often results in biased pseudo-labels, thereby hindering both transferability and discriminability. In contrast, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), pretrained on massive and diverse data, exhibit strong perception capabilities and broad generalization, yet their potential remains largely untapped in the SFOD setting. In this paper, we propose a novel SFOD framework that leverages VFMs as external knowledge sources to jointly enhance feature alignment and label quality. Specifically, we design three VFM-based modules: (1) Patch-weighted Global Feature Alignment (PGFA) distills global features from VFMs using patch-similarity-based weighting to enhance global feature transferability; (2) Prototype-based Instance Feature Alignment (PIFA) performs instance-level contrastive learning guided by momentum-updated VFM prototypes; and (3) Dual-source Enhanced Pseudo-label Fusion (DEPF) fuses predictions from detection VFMs and teacher models via an entropy-aware strategy to yield more reliable supervision. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art SFOD performance, validating the effectiveness of integrating VFMs to simultaneously improve transferability and discriminability.

RETuning: Upgrading Inference-Time Scaling for Stock Movement Prediction with Large Language Models

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding reasoning capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks. However, their application to financial tasks-especially the most fundamental task of stock movement prediction-remains underexplored. We study a three-class classification problem (up, hold, down) and, by analyzing existing reasoning responses, observe that: (1) LLMs follow analysts' opinions rather than exhibit a systematic, independent analytical logic (CoTs). (2) LLMs list summaries from different sources without weighing adversarial evidence, yet such counterevidence is crucial for reliable prediction. It shows that the model does not make good use of its reasoning ability to complete the task. To address this, we propose Reflective Evidence Tuning (RETuning), a cold-start method prior to reinforcement learning, to enhance prediction ability. While generating CoT, RETuning encourages dynamically constructing an analytical framework from diverse information sources, organizing and scoring evidence for price up or down based on that framework-rather than on contextual viewpoints-and finally reflecting to derive the prediction. This approach maximally aligns the model with its learned analytical framework, ensuring independent logical reasoning and reducing undue influence from context. We also build a large-scale dataset spanning all of 2024 for 5,123 A-share stocks, with long contexts (32K tokens) and over 200K samples. In addition to price and news, it incorporates analysts' opinions, quantitative reports, fundamental data, macroeconomic indicators, and similar stocks. Experiments show that RETuning successfully unlocks the model's reasoning ability in the financial domain. Inference-time scaling still works even after 6 months or on out-of-distribution stocks, since the models gain valuable insights about stock movement prediction.