Abstract:Learning stochastic functions from partially observed context-target pairs is a fundamental problem in probabilistic modeling. Traditional models like Gaussian Processes (GPs) face scalability issues with large datasets and assume Gaussianity, limiting their applicability. While Neural Processes (NPs) offer more flexibility, they struggle with capturing complex, multi-modal target distributions. Neural Diffusion Processes (NDPs) enhance expressivity through a learned diffusion process but rely solely on conditional signals in the denoising network, resulting in weak input coupling from an unconditional forward process and semantic mismatch at the diffusion endpoint. In this work, we propose Neural Bridge Processes (NBPs), a novel method for modeling stochastic functions where inputs x act as dynamic anchors for the entire diffusion trajectory. By reformulating the forward kernel to explicitly depend on x, NBP enforces a constrained path that strictly terminates at the supervised target. This approach not only provides stronger gradient signals but also guarantees endpoint coherence. We validate NBPs on synthetic data, EEG signal regression and image regression tasks, achieving substantial improvements over baselines. These results underscore the effectiveness of DDPM-style bridge sampling in enhancing both performance and theoretical consistency for structured prediction tasks.
Abstract:Timely and accurate severe weather warnings are critical for disaster mitigation. However, current forecasting systems remain heavily reliant on manual expert interpretation, introducing subjectivity and significant operational burdens. With the rapid development of AI technologies, the end-to-end "AI weather station" is gradually emerging as a new trend in predicting severe weather events. Three core challenges impede the development of end-to-end AI severe weather system: (1) scarcity of severe weather event samples; (2) imperfect alignment between high-dimensional meteorological data and textual warnings; (3) existing multimodal language models are unable to handle high-dimensional meteorological data and struggle to fully capture the complex dependencies across temporal sequences, vertical pressure levels, and spatial dimensions. To address these challenges, we introduce MP-Bench, the first large-scale temporal multimodal dataset for severe weather events prediction, comprising 421,363 pairs of raw multi-year meteorological data and corresponding text caption, covering a wide range of severe weather scenarios across China. On top of this dataset, we develop a meteorology multimodal large model (MMLM) that directly ingests 4D meteorological inputs. In addition, it is designed to accommodate the unique characteristics of 4D meteorological data flow, incorporating three plug-and-play adaptive fusion modules that enable dynamic feature extraction and integration across temporal sequences, vertical pressure layers, and spatial dimensions. Extensive experiments on MP-Bench demonstrate that MMLM performs exceptionally well across multiple tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in severe weather understanding and marking a key step toward realizing automated, AI-driven weather forecasting systems. Our source code and dataset will be made publicly available.
Abstract:Online advertising systems typically use a cascaded architecture to manage massive requests and candidate volumes, where the ranking stages allocate traffic based on eCPM (predicted CTR $\times$ Bid). With the increasing popularity of auto-bidding strategies, the inconsistency between the computationally sensitive retrieval stage and the ranking stages becomes more pronounced, as the former cannot access precise, real-time bids for the vast ad corpus. This discrepancy leads to sub-optimal platform revenue and advertiser outcomes. To tackle this problem, we propose Bidding-Aware Retrieval (BAR), a model-based retrieval framework that addresses multi-stage inconsistency by incorporating ad bid value into the retrieval scoring function. The core innovation is Bidding-Aware Modeling, incorporating bid signals through monotonicity-constrained learning and multi-task distillation to ensure economically coherent representations, while Asynchronous Near-Line Inference enables real-time updates to the embedding for market responsiveness. Furthermore, the Task-Attentive Refinement module selectively enhances feature interactions to disentangle user interest and commercial value signals. Extensive offline experiments and full-scale deployment across Alibaba's display advertising platform validated BAR's efficacy: 4.32% platform revenue increase with 22.2% impression lift for positively-operated advertisements.
Abstract:Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful paradigm for solving complex, multifaceted problems. However, the potential of these systems is often constrained by the prevalent plan-and-execute framework, which suffers from critical limitations: rigid plan execution, static agent capabilities, and inefficient communication. These weaknesses hinder their adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces Aime, a novel multi-agent framework designed to overcome these challenges through dynamic, reactive planning and execution. Aime replaces the conventional static workflow with a fluid and adaptive architecture. Its core innovations include: (1) a Dynamic Planner that continuously refines the overall strategy based on real-time execution feedback; (2) an Actor Factory that implements Dynamic Actor instantiation, assembling specialized agents on-demand with tailored tools and knowledge; and (3) a centralized Progress Management Module that serves as a single source of truth for coherent, system-wide state awareness. We empirically evaluated Aime on a diverse suite of benchmarks spanning general reasoning (GAIA), software engineering (SWE-bench Verified), and live web navigation (WebVoyager). The results demonstrate that Aime consistently outperforms even highly specialized state-of-the-art agents in their respective domains. Its superior adaptability and task success rate establish Aime as a more resilient and effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration.
Abstract:Personalization is a critical task in modern intelligent systems, with applications spanning diverse domains, including interactions with large language models (LLMs). Recent advances in reasoning capabilities have significantly enhanced LLMs, enabling unprecedented performance in tasks such as mathematics and coding. However, their potential for personalization tasks remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic evaluation of large reasoning models (LRMs) for personalization tasks. Surprisingly, despite generating more tokens, LRMs do not consistently outperform general-purpose LLMs, especially in retrieval-intensive scenarios where their advantages diminish. Our analysis identifies three key limitations: divergent thinking, misalignment of response formats, and ineffective use of retrieved information. To address these challenges, we propose Reinforced Reasoning for Personalization (\model), a novel framework that incorporates a hierarchical reasoning thought template to guide LRMs in generating structured outputs. Additionally, we introduce a reasoning process intervention method to enforce adherence to designed reasoning patterns, enhancing alignment. We also propose a cross-referencing mechanism to ensure consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing techniques.
Abstract:The integration of reinforcement learning (RL) into the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has rapidly emerged as a transformative research direction. While MLLMs significantly extend Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle diverse modalities such as vision, audio, and video, enabling robust reasoning across multimodal inputs remains a major challenge. This survey systematically reviews recent advances in RL-based reasoning for MLLMs, covering key algorithmic designs, reward mechanism innovations, and practical applications. We highlight two main RL paradigms--value-free and value-based methods--and analyze how RL enhances reasoning abilities by optimizing reasoning trajectories and aligning multimodal information. Furthermore, we provide an extensive overview of benchmark datasets, evaluation protocols, and existing limitations, and propose future research directions to address current bottlenecks such as sparse rewards, inefficient cross-modal reasoning, and real-world deployment constraints. Our goal is to offer a comprehensive and structured guide to researchers interested in advancing RL-based reasoning in the multimodal era.
Abstract:Air quality prediction plays a crucial role in public health and environmental protection. Accurate air quality prediction is a complex multivariate spatiotemporal problem, that involves interactions across temporal patterns, pollutant correlations, spatial station dependencies, and particularly meteorological influences that govern pollutant dispersion and chemical transformations. Existing works underestimate the critical role of atmospheric conditions in air quality prediction and neglect comprehensive meteorological data utilization, thereby impairing the modeling of dynamic interdependencies between air quality and meteorological data. To overcome this, we propose MDSTNet, an encoder-decoder framework that explicitly models air quality observations and atmospheric conditions as distinct modalities, integrating multi-pressure-level meteorological data and weather forecasts to capture atmosphere-pollution dependencies for prediction. Meantime, we construct ChinaAirNet, the first nationwide dataset combining air quality records with multi-pressure-level meteorological observations. Experimental results on ChinaAirNet demonstrate MDSTNet's superiority, substantially reducing 48-hour prediction errors by 17.54\% compared to the state-of-the-art model. The source code and dataset will be available on github.
Abstract:As a strategic pillar industry for human survival and development, modern agriculture faces dual challenges: optimizing production efficiency and achieving sustainable development. Against the backdrop of intensified climate change leading to frequent extreme weather events, the uncertainty risks in agricultural production systems are increasing exponentially. To address these challenges, this study proposes an innovative \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{A}gricultural \textbf{A}gent \textbf{A}rchitecture (\textbf{MA3}), which leverages cross-modal information fusion and task collaboration mechanisms to achieve intelligent agricultural decision-making. This study constructs a multimodal agricultural agent dataset encompassing five major tasks: classification, detection, Visual Question Answering (VQA), tool selection, and agent evaluation. We propose a unified backbone for sugarcane disease classification and detection tools, as well as a sugarcane disease expert model. By integrating an innovative tool selection module, we develop a multimodal agricultural agent capable of effectively performing tasks in classification, detection, and VQA. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-dimensional quantitative evaluation framework and conduct a comprehensive assessment of the entire architecture over our evaluation dataset, thereby verifying the practicality and robustness of MA3 in agricultural scenarios. This study provides new insights and methodologies for the development of agricultural agents, holding significant theoretical and practical implications. Our source code and dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Abstract:Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress in open-world Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, integrating visual information increases the number of processed tokens, leading to higher GPU memory usage and computational overhead. Images often contain more redundant information than text, and not all visual details are pertinent to specific questions. To address these challenges, we propose QG-VTC, a novel question-guided visual token compression method for MLLM-based VQA tasks. QG-VTC employs a pretrained text encoder and a learnable feed-forward layer to embed user questions into the vision encoder's feature space then computes correlation scores between the question embeddings and visual tokens. By selecting the most relevant tokens and softly compressing others, QG-VTC ensures fine-tuned relevance to user needs. Additionally, a progressive strategy applies this compression across different vision encoder layers, gradually reducing token numbers. This approach maximizes retention of question-relevant information while discarding irrelevant details. Experimental results show that our method achieves performance on par with uncompressed models using just 1/8 of the visual tokens. The code and model will be publicly available on GitHub.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have been integrated into recommender systems to enhance user behavior comprehension. The Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technique is further incorporated into these systems to retrieve more relevant items and improve system performance. However, existing RAG methods have two shortcomings. \textit{(i)} In the \textit{retrieval} stage, they rely primarily on textual semantics and often fail to incorporate the most relevant items, thus constraining system effectiveness. \textit{(ii)} In the \textit{generation} stage, they lack explicit chain-of-thought reasoning, further limiting their potential. In this paper, we propose Representation learning and \textbf{R}easoning empowered retrieval-\textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{L}arge \textbf{L}anguage model \textbf{Rec}ommendation (RALLRec+). Specifically, for the retrieval stage, we prompt LLMs to generate detailed item descriptions and perform joint representation learning, combining textual and collaborative signals extracted from the LLM and recommendation models, respectively. To account for the time-varying nature of user interests, we propose a simple yet effective reranking method to capture preference dynamics. For the generation phase, we first evaluate reasoning LLMs on recommendation tasks, uncovering valuable insights. Then we introduce knowledge-injected prompting and consistency-based merging approach to integrate reasoning LLMs with general-purpose LLMs, enhancing overall performance. Extensive experiments on three real world datasets validate our method's effectiveness.