When Recommendation Denoising Meets Popularity Bias: Understanding and Mitigating Their Interaction

Implicit feedback is the dominant data source for recommender systems, but behavioral logs are often contaminated by false-positive interactions caused by mis-clicks, biased exposure, and interface effects. Denoising recommendation methods improve robustness by down-weighting or filtering interactions suspected to be noisy, often relying on the small-loss heuristic. We revisit this heuristic through the lens of popularity bias. Tail-item positives can be harder to fit because they are sparsely observed, and thus may receive larger losses even when they reflect genuine user preference. Under such popularity-dependent loss patterns, monotone loss-based reweighting can suppress clean-but-hard tail signals and increase the head-tail imbalance in effective supervision. We formalize this interaction through the effective head-tail signal ratio induced by denoising weights and derive a conditional reallocation result: when the loss distribution of tail positives is right-shifted relative to that of head positives, small-loss reweighting increases the effective head-tail signal ratio compared with ERM. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Popularity-Aware Denoising (PAD), a lightweight plug-in framework that modulates denoising strength by item popularity. PAD applies stronger denoising to highly exposed items while being more conservative on tail items, preserving more clean-but-hard long-tail signals. Experiments on three datasets and three backbones show that PAD generally improves over representative denoising baselines and provides favorable accuracy-diversity tradeoffs, especially on MF-style recommenders.

UniLab: A Heterogeneous Architecture for Robot RL Beyond GPU-Dominant Paradigms

Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, FastSAC, FlashSAC, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10$\times$ under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://unilabsim.github.io.

A Heterogeneous Architecture for Robot RL Beyond GPU-Dominant Paradigms

Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, SAC, FlashSAC, TD3, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10$\times$ under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://github.com/unilabsim/UniLab.

Respecting Modality Gap in Post-hoc Out-of-distribution Detection with Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has emerged as a popular technique to enhance the reliability of machine learning models by identifying unexpected inputs from unknown classes. Recent progress in pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) has enabled zero-shot OOD detection without access to in-distribution (ID) training data; in this setting, existing methods commonly treat text embeddings of class names as class prototypes. In this paper, we challenge the widely adopted text-as-prototype paradigm by theoretically showing that off-the-shelf textual prototypes are generally misaligned with the optimal visual prototypes, yielding an intrinsic modality gap that cannot be eliminated by prompt engineering alone. To mitigate this gap under the post-hoc constraint, this paper presents an online pseudo-supervised framework that directly learns class prototypes in the visual feature space using unlabeled test-time data streams and soft predictions from the pre-trained VLMs. We provide theoretical guarantees for the convergence of the online optimization procedure. Extensive experiments empirically demonstrate that our method achieves a new state of the art across a variety of OOD detection setups.

Debiased Negative Mining Improves Out-of-distribution Detection with Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

Aiming at identifying unexpected inputs from unknown classes, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has emerged as a pivotal approach to enhancing the reliability of machine learning models. This paper focuses on the burgeoning paradigm of post-hoc OOD detection with pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), where a popular pipeline is to detect OOD inputs by examining their affinities between ID labels and negative labels, i.e., those semantically different from ID labels. Due to the unavailability of target OOD labels, existing works predominantly rely on heuristic rules to mine negative labels from unlabeled wild corpus data. Despite the empirical success, we argue that the power of VLM-based OOD detection has yet to be fully unleashed since the notorious false negative problem is far from addressed in the literature. With this motivation, we are interested in addressing the challenge of mining true negative labels for OOD scoring. To this end, we develop a theoretical framework for correcting the sampling bias of negatives labels by indirectly approximating the distribution of negative labels. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that the debiased negative mining can be naturally converted into Monte-Carlo sampling based on ID labels and the unlabeled wild corpus data. Extensive experiments empirically manifest that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art in a variety of OOD detection setups. Code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/60pen9/Debiased-Negative-Mining-Improves-OOD-Detection-with-Pre-trained-VLMs}{\textcolor{red}{here}}.

Precision Synthesis of Multi-Tracer PET via VLM-Modulated Rectified Flow for Stratifying Mild Cognitive Impairment

The biological definition of Alzheimer's disease (AD) relies on multi-modal neuroimaging, yet the clinical utility of positron emission tomography (PET) is limited by cost and radiation exposure, hindering early screening at preclinical or prodromal stages. While generative models offer a promising alternative by synthesizing PET from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), achieving subject-specific precision remains a primary challenge. Here, we introduce DIReCT$++$, a Domain-Informed ReCTified flow model for synthesizing multi-tracer PET from MRI combined with fundamental clinical information. Our approach integrates a 3D rectified flow architecture to capture complex cross-modal and cross-tracer relationships with a domain-adapted vision-language model (BiomedCLIP) that provides text-guided, personalized generation using clinical scores and imaging knowledge. Extensive evaluations on multi-center datasets demonstrate that DIReCT$++$ not only produces synthetic PET images ($^{18}$F-AV-45 and $^{18}$F-FDG) of superior fidelity and generalizability but also accurately recapitulates disease-specific patterns. Crucially, combining these synthesized PET images with MRI enables precise personalized stratification of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), advancing a scalable, data-efficient tool for the early diagnosis and prognostic prediction of AD. The source code will be released on https://github.com/ladderlab-xjtu/DIReCT-PLUS.

Choosing How to Remember: Adaptive Memory Structures for LLM Agents

Memory is critical for enabling large language model (LLM) based agents to maintain coherent behavior over long-horizon interactions. However, existing agent memory systems suffer from two key gaps: they rely on a one-size-fits-all memory structure and do not model memory structure selection as a context-adaptive decision, limiting their ability to handle heterogeneous interaction patterns and resulting in suboptimal performance. We propose a unified framework, FluxMem, that enables adaptive memory organization for LLM agents. Our framework equips agents with multiple complementary memory structures. It explicitly learns to select among these structures based on interaction-level features, using offline supervision derived from downstream response quality and memory utilization. To support robust long-horizon memory evolution, we further introduce a three-level memory hierarchy and a Beta Mixture Model-based probabilistic gate for distribution-aware memory fusion, replacing brittle similarity thresholds. Experiments on two long-horizon benchmarks, PERSONAMEM and LoCoMo, demonstrate that our method achieves average improvements of 9.18% and 6.14%.

Delving into Spectral Clustering with Vision-Language Representations

Spectral clustering is known as a powerful technique in unsupervised data analysis. The vast majority of approaches to spectral clustering are driven by a single modality, leaving the rich information in multi-modal representations untapped. Inspired by the recent success of vision-language pre-training, this paper enriches the landscape of spectral clustering from a single-modal to a multi-modal regime. Particularly, we propose Neural Tangent Kernel Spectral Clustering that leverages cross-modal alignment in pre-trained vision-language models. By anchoring the neural tangent kernel with positive nouns, i.e., those semantically close to the images of interest, we arrive at formulating the affinity between images as a coupling of their visual proximity and semantic overlap. We show that this formulation amplifies within-cluster connections while suppressing spurious ones across clusters, hence encouraging block-diagonal structures. In addition, we present a regularized affinity diffusion mechanism that adaptively ensembles affinity matrices induced by different prompts. Extensive experiments on \textbf{16} benchmarks -- including classical, large-scale, fine-grained and domain-shifted datasets -- manifest that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin.

EExApp: GNN-Based Reinforcement Learning for Radio Unit Energy Optimization in 5G O-RAN

With over 3.5 million 5G base stations deployed globally, their collective energy consumption (projected to exceed 131 TWh annually) raises significant concerns over both operational costs and environmental impacts. In this paper, we present EExAPP, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based xApp for 5G Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) that jointly optimizes radio unit (RU) sleep scheduling and distributed unit (DU) resource slicing. EExAPP uses a dual-actor-dual-critic Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) architecture, with dedicated actor-critic pairs targeting energy efficiency and quality-of-service (QoS) compliance. A transformer-based encoder enables scalable handling of variable user equipment (UE) populations by encoding all-UE observations into fixed-dimensional representations. To coordinate the two optimization objectives, a bipartite Graph Attention Network (GAT) is used to modulate actor updates based on both critic outputs, enabling adaptive tradeoffs between power savings and QoS. We have implemented EExAPP and deployed it on a real-world 5G O-RAN testbed with live traffic, commercial RU and smartphones. Extensive over-the-air experiments and ablation studies confirm that EExAPP significantly outperforms existing methods in reducing the energy consumption of RU while maintaining QoS.

VGAS: Value-Guided Action-Chunk Selection for Few-Shot Vision-Language-Action Adaptation

Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models bridge multimodal reasoning with physical control, but adapting them to new tasks with scarce demonstrations remains unreliable. While fine-tuned VLA policies often produce semantically plausible trajectories, failures often arise from unresolved geometric ambiguities, where near-miss action candidates lead to divergent execution outcomes under limited supervision. We study few-shot VLA adaptation from a \emph{generation--selection} perspective and propose a novel framework \textbf{VGAS} (\textbf{V}alue-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{A}ction-chunk \textbf{S}election). It performs inference-time best-of-$N$ selection to identify action chunks that are both semantically faithful and geometrically precise. Specifically, \textbf{VGAS} employs a finetuned VLA as a high-recall proposal generator and introduces the \textrm{Q-Chunk-Former}, a geometrically grounded Transformer critic to resolve fine-grained geometric ambiguities. In addition, we propose \textit{Explicit Geometric Regularization} (\texttt{EGR}), which explicitly shapes a discriminative value landscape to preserve action ranking resolution among near-miss candidates while mitigating value instability under scarce supervision. Experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that \textbf{VGAS} consistently improves success rates and robustness under limited demonstrations and distribution shifts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jyugo-15/VGAS.