Selective Noise Suppression and Discriminative Mutual Interaction for Robust Audio-Visual Segmentation

The ability to capture and segment sounding objects in dynamic visual scenes is crucial for the development of Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) tasks. While significant progress has been made in this area, the interaction between audio and visual modalities still requires further exploration. In this work, we aim to answer the following questions: How can a model effectively suppress audio noise while enhancing relevant audio information? How can we achieve discriminative interaction between the audio and visual modalities? To this end, we propose SDAVS, equipped with the Selective Noise-Resilient Processor (SNRP) module and the Discriminative Audio-Visual Mutual Fusion (DAMF) strategy. The proposed SNRP mitigates audio noise interference by selectively emphasizing relevant auditory cues, while DAMF ensures more consistent audio-visual representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark AVS datasets, especially in multi-source and complex scenes. \textit{The code and model are available at https://github.com/happylife-pk/SDAVS}.

Non-Markovian Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation via Keyframe Chaining

Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often struggle to generalize to long-horizon tasks due to their heavy reliance on immediate observations. While recent studies incorporate retrieval mechanisms or extend context windows to handle procedural tasks, they often struggle to capture Non-Markovian dependencies, where optimal actions rely solely on specific past states rather than the current observation. To address this, we introduce Keyframe-Chaining VLA, a framework that extracts and links key historical frames to model long-horizon dependencies. Specifically, we propose an automatic keyframe selector that learns a discriminative embedding space, effectively identifying distinct state transitions. To capture task-critical information, we design a progress-aware query mechanism that dynamically retrieves historical frames based on their temporal relevance to the current execution phase. These selected keyframes are integrated into the VLA as interleaved visual tokens, explicitly grounding the policy in the long-horizon temporal context. Finally, we introduce a suite of four Non-Markovian manipulation tasks built upon the ManiSkill simulator to measure task success rates. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance, effectively tackling robot manipulation tasks characterized by long-horizon temporal dependencies. Code is available at https://github.com/cytoplastm/KC-VLA.

Self-Correcting VLA: Online Action Refinement via Sparse World Imagination

Standard vision-language-action (VLA) models rely on fitting statistical data priors, limiting their robust understanding of underlying physical dynamics. Reinforcement learning enhances physical grounding through exploration yet typically relies on external reward signals that remain isolated from the agent's internal states. World action models have emerged as a promising paradigm that integrates imagination and control to enable predictive planning. However, they rely on implicit context modeling, lacking explicit mechanisms for self-improvement. To solve these problems, we propose Self-Correcting VLA (SC-VLA), which achieve self-improvement by intrinsically guiding action refinement through sparse imagination. We first design sparse world imagination by integrating auxiliary predictive heads to forecast current task progress and future trajectory trends, thereby constraining the policy to encode short-term physical evolution. Then we introduce the online action refinement module to reshape progress-dependent dense rewards, adjusting trajectory orientation based on the predicted sparse future states. Evaluations on challenging robot manipulation tasks from simulation benchmarks and real-world settings demonstrate that SC-VLA achieve state-of-the-art performance, yielding the highest task throughput with 16% fewer steps and a 9% higher success rate than the best-performing baselines, alongside a 14% gain in real-world experiments. Code is available at https://github.com/Kisaragi0/SC-VLA.

MOTIF: Learning Action Motifs for Few-shot Cross-Embodiment Transfer

While vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced generalist robotic learning, cross-embodiment transfer remains challenging due to kinematic heterogeneity and the high cost of collecting sufficient real-world demonstrations to support fine-tuning. Existing cross-embodiment policies typically rely on shared-private architectures, which suffer from limited capacity of private parameters and lack explicit adaptation mechanisms. To address these limitations, we introduce MOTIF for efficient few-shot cross-embodiment transfer that decouples embodiment-agnostic spatiotemporal patterns, termed action motifs, from heterogeneous action data. Specifically, MOTIF first learns unified motifs via vector quantization with progress-aware alignment and embodiment adversarial constraints to ensure temporal and cross-embodiment consistency. We then design a lightweight predictor that predicts these motifs from real-time inputs to guide a flow-matching policy, fusing them with robot-specific states to enable action generation on new embodiments. Evaluations across both simulation and real-world environments validate the superiority of MOTIF, which significantly outperforms strong baselines in few-shot transfer scenarios by 6.5% in simulation and 43.7% in real-world settings. Code is available at https://github.com/buduz/MOTIF.

AC^2-VLA: Action-Context-Aware Adaptive Computation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Efficient Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance in robotic manipulation, yet their closed-loop deployment is hindered by the high latency and compute cost of repeatedly running large vision-language backbones at every timestep. We observe that VLA inference exhibits structured redundancies across temporal, spatial, and depth dimensions, and that most existing efficiency methods ignore action context, despite its central role in embodied tasks. To address this gap, we propose Action-Context-aware Adaptive Computation for VLA models (AC^2-VLA), a unified framework that conditions computation on current visual observations, language instructions, and previous action states. Based on this action-centric context, AC^2-VLA adaptively performs cognition reuse across timesteps, token pruning, and selective execution of model components within a unified mechanism. To train the adaptive policy, we introduce an action-guided self-distillation scheme that preserves the behavior of the dense VLA policy while enabling structured sparsification that transfers across tasks and settings. Extensive experiments on robotic manipulation benchmarks show that AC^2-VLA achieves up to a 1.79\times speedup while reducing FLOPs to 29.4% of the dense baseline, with comparable task success.

Learning ORDER-Aware Multimodal Representations for Composite Materials Design

Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown remarkable success in materials discovery and property prediction, particularly for crystalline and polymer systems where material properties and structures are dominated by discrete graph representations. Such graph-central paradigm breaks down on composite materials, which possess continuous and nonlinear design spaces that lack well-defined graph structures. General composite descriptors, e.g., fiber volume and misalignment angle, cannot fully capture the fiber distributions that fundamentally determine microstructural characteristics, necessitating the integration of heterogeneous data sources through multimodal learning. Existing alignment-oriented multimodal frameworks have proven effective on abundant crystal or polymer data under discrete, unique graph-property mapping assumptions, but fail to address the highly continuous composite design space under extreme data scarcity. In this work, we introduce ORDinal-aware imagE-tabulaR alignment (ORDER), a multimodal pretraining framework that establishes ordinality as a core principle for composite material representations. ORDER ensures that materials with similar target properties occupy nearby regions in the latent space, which effectively preserves the continuous nature of composite properties and enables meaningful interpolation between sparsely observed designs. We evaluate ORDER on a public Nanofiber-enforced composite dataset and an internally curated dataset that simulates the construction of carbon fiber T700 with diverse fiber distributions. ORDER achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art multimodal baselines across property prediction, cross-modal retrieval, and microstructure generation tasks.

Surgical Scene Segmentation using a Spike-Driven Video Transformer with Real-Time Potential

Modern surgical systems increasingly rely on intelligent scene understanding to provide timely situational awareness for enhanced intra-operative safety. Within this pipeline, surgical scene segmentation plays a central role in accurately perceiving operative events. Although recent deep learning models, particularly large-scale foundation models, achieve remarkable segmentation accuracy, their substantial computational demands and power consumption hinder real-time deployment in resource-constrained surgical environments. To address this limitation, we explore the emerging SNN as a promising paradigm for highly efficient surgical intelligence. However, their performance is still constrained by the scarcity of labeled surgical data and the inherently sparse nature of surgical video representations. To this end, we propose \textit{SpikeSurgSeg}, the first spike-driven video Transformer framework tailored for surgical scene segmentation with real-time potential on non-GPU platforms. To address the limited availability of surgical annotations, we introduce a surgical-scene masked autoencoding pretraining strategy for SNNs that enables robust spatiotemporal representation learning via layer-wise tube masking. Building on this pretrained backbone, we further adopt a lightweight spike-driven segmentation head that produces temporally consistent predictions while preserving the low-latency characteristics of SNNs. Extensive experiments on EndoVis18 and our in-house SurgBleed dataset demonstrate that SpikeSurgSeg achieves mIoU comparable to SOTA ANN-based models while reducing inference latency by at least $8\times$. Notably, it delivers over $20\times$ acceleration relative to most foundation-model baselines, underscoring its potential for time-critical surgical scene segmentation.

The Devil is in Attention Sharing: Improving Complex Non-rigid Image Editing Faithfulness via Attention Synergy

Training-free image editing with large diffusion models has become practical, yet faithfully performing complex non-rigid edits (e.g., pose or shape changes) remains highly challenging. We identify a key underlying cause: attention collapse in existing attention sharing mechanisms, where either positional embeddings or semantic features dominate visual content retrieval, leading to over-editing or under-editing. To address this issue, we introduce SynPS, a method that Synergistically leverages Positional embeddings and Semantic information for faithful non-rigid image editing. We first propose an editing measurement that quantifies the required editing magnitude at each denoising step. Based on this measurement, we design an attention synergy pipeline that dynamically modulates the influence of positional embeddings, enabling SynPS to balance semantic modifications and fidelity preservation. By adaptively integrating positional and semantic cues, SynPS effectively avoids both over- and under-editing. Extensive experiments on public and newly curated benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance and faithfulness of our approach.

Distributed Zero-Shot Learning for Visual Recognition

In this paper, we propose a Distributed Zero-Shot Learning (DistZSL) framework that can fully exploit decentralized data to learn an effective model for unseen classes. Considering the data heterogeneity issues across distributed nodes, we introduce two key components to ensure the effective learning of DistZSL: a cross-node attribute regularizer and a global attribute-to-visual consensus. Our proposed cross-node attribute regularizer enforces the distances between attribute features to be similar across different nodes. In this manner, the overall attribute feature space would be stable during learning, and thus facilitate the establishment of visual-to-attribute(V2A) relationships. Then, we introduce the global attribute-tovisual consensus to mitigate biased V2A mappings learned from individual nodes. Specifically, we enforce the bilateral mapping between the attribute and visual feature distributions to be consistent across different nodes. Thus, the learned consistent V2A mapping can significantly enhance zero-shot learning across different nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DistZSL achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art in learning from distributed data.

Acquiring Common Chinese Emotional Events Using Large Language Model

Knowledge about emotional events is an important kind of knowledge which has been applied to improve the effectiveness of different applications. However, emotional events cannot be easily acquired, especially common or generalized emotional events that are context-independent. The goal of this paper is to obtain common emotional events in Chinese language such as "win a prize" and "be criticized". Our approach begins by collecting a comprehensive list of Chinese emotional event indicators. Then, we generate emotional events by prompting a Chinese large language model (LLM) using these indicators. To ensure the quality of these emotional events, we train a filter to discard invalid generated results. We also classify these emotional events as being positive events and negative events using different techniques. Finally, we harvest a total of 102,218 high-quality common emotional events with sentiment polarity labels, which is the only large-scale commonsense knowledge base of emotional events in Chinese language. Intrinsic evaluation results show that the proposed method in this paper can be effectively used to acquire common Chinese emotional events. An extrinsic use case also demonstrates the strong potential of common emotional events in the field of emotion cause extraction (ECE). Related resources including emotional event indicators and emotional events will be released after the publication of this paper.