Step Potential Advantage Estimation: Harnessing Intermediate Confidence and Correctness for Efficient Mathematical Reasoning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) elicits long chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but outcome-based rewards lead to coarse-grained advantage estimation. While existing approaches improve RLVR via token-level entropy or sequence-level length control, they lack a semantically grounded, step-level measure of reasoning progress. As a result, LLMs fail to distinguish necessary deduction from redundant verification: they may continue checking after reaching a correct solution and, in extreme cases, overturn a correct trajectory into an incorrect final answer. To remedy the lack of process supervision, we introduce a training-free probing mechanism that extracts intermediate confidence and correctness and combines them into a Step Potential signal that explicitly estimates the reasoning state at each step. Building on this signal, we propose Step Potential Advantage Estimation (SPAE), a fine-grained credit assignment method that amplifies potential gains, penalizes potential drops, and applies penalty after potential saturates to encourage timely termination. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show SPAE consistently improves accuracy while substantially reducing response length, outperforming strong RL baselines and recent efficient reasoning and token-level advantage estimation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/cii030/SPAE-RL.

Rethinking Secure Semantic Communications in the Age of Generative and Agentic AI: Threats and Opportunities

Semantic communication (SemCom) improves communication efficiency by transmitting task-relevant information instead of raw bits and is expected to be a key technology for 6G networks. Recent advances in generative AI (GenAI) further enhance SemCom by enabling robust semantic encoding and decoding under limited channel conditions. However, these efficiency gains also introduce new security and privacy vulnerabilities. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, eavesdroppers can also use powerful GenAI-based semantic decoders to recover private information from intercepted signals. Moreover, rapid advances in agentic AI enable eavesdroppers to perform long-term and adaptive inference through the integration of memory, external knowledge, and reasoning capabilities. This allows eavesdroppers to further infer user private behavior and intent beyond the transmitted content. Motivated by these emerging challenges, this paper comprehensively rethinks the security and privacy of SemCom systems in the age of generative and agentic AI. We first present a systematic taxonomy of eavesdropping threat models in SemCom systems. Then, we provide insights into how GenAI and agentic AI can enhance eavesdropping threats. Meanwhile, we also highlight potential opportunities for leveraging GenAI and agentic AI to design privacy-preserving SemCom systems.

REST: Diffusion-based Real-time End-to-end Streaming Talking Head Generation via ID-Context Caching and Asynchronous Streaming Distillation

Diffusion models have significantly advanced the field of talking head generation. However, the slow inference speeds and non-autoregressive paradigms severely constrain the application of diffusion-based THG models. In this study, we propose REST, the first diffusion-based, real-time, end-to-end streaming audio-driven talking head generation framework. To support real-time end-to-end generation, a compact video latent space is first learned through high spatiotemporal VAE compression. Additionally, to enable autoregressive streaming within the compact video latent space, we introduce an ID-Context Cache mechanism, which integrates ID-Sink and Context-Cache principles to key-value caching for maintaining temporal consistency and identity coherence during long-time streaming generation. Furthermore, an Asynchronous Streaming Distillation (ASD) training strategy is proposed to mitigate error accumulation in autoregressive generation and enhance temporal consistency, which leverages a non-streaming teacher with an asynchronous noise schedule to supervise the training of the streaming student model. REST bridges the gap between autoregressive and diffusion-based approaches, demonstrating substantial value for applications requiring real-time talking head generation. Experimental results demonstrate that REST outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generation speed and overall performance.

Revolutionizing Mixed Precision Quantization: Towards Training-free Automatic Proxy Discovery via Large Language Models

Mixed-Precision Quantization (MPQ) liberates the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) from the Out-Of-Memory (OOM) bottleneck, which garnered increasing research attention. However, conventional methods either searched from costly differentiable optimization, which is neither efficient nor flexible, or learned a quantized DNN from the proxy (i.e., HAWQ) manually designed by human experts, which is labor-intensive and requires huge expert knowledge. Can we design a proxy without involving any human experts and training? In this paper, we provide an affirmative answer by proposing a novel Large Language Models (LLMs)-driven Training-free Automatic Proxy (dubbed TAP) discovery framework, which reforms the design paradigm of MPQ by utilizing LLMs to find superior TAP tailored for MPQ, automatically. In addition, to bridge the gap between black-box LLMs and the tough MPQ task, we ingeniously propose simple Direct Policy Optimization (DPO) based reinforcement learning to enhance LLMs' reasoning by optimizing prompts, which can construct a positive feedback loop between the LLM and the MPQ task, enabling LLMs to generate better TAP in the next evolution. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that TAP achieves state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we truly believe that our TAP will significantly contribute to the MPQ community by providing a new perspective on LLM-driven design algorithms.

From Structure to Detail: Hierarchical Distillation for Efficient Diffusion Model

The inference latency of diffusion models remains a critical barrier to their real-time application. While trajectory-based and distribution-based step distillation methods offer solutions, they present a fundamental trade-off. Trajectory-based methods preserve global structure but act as a "lossy compressor", sacrificing high-frequency details. Conversely, distribution-based methods can achieve higher fidelity but often suffer from mode collapse and unstable training. This paper recasts them from independent paradigms into synergistic components within our novel Hierarchical Distillation (HD) framework. We leverage trajectory distillation not as a final generator, but to establish a structural ``sketch", providing a near-optimal initialization for the subsequent distribution-based refinement stage. This strategy yields an ideal initial distribution that enhances the ceiling of overall performance. To further improve quality, we introduce and refine the adversarial training process. We find standard discriminator structures are ineffective at refining an already high-quality generator. To overcome this, we introduce the Adaptive Weighted Discriminator (AWD), tailored for the HD pipeline. By dynamically allocating token weights, AWD focuses on local imperfections, enabling efficient detail refinement. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks. On ImageNet $256\times256$, our single-step model achieves an FID of 2.26, rivaling its 250-step teacher. It also achieves promising results on the high-resolution text-to-image MJHQ benchmark, proving its generalizability. Our method establishes a robust new paradigm for high-fidelity, single-step diffusion models.

VSE-MOT: Multi-Object Tracking in Low-Quality Video Scenes Guided by Visual Semantic Enhancement

Current multi-object tracking (MOT) algorithms typically overlook issues inherent in low-quality videos, leading to significant degradation in tracking performance when confronted with real-world image deterioration. Therefore, advancing the application of MOT algorithms in real-world low-quality video scenarios represents a critical and meaningful endeavor. To address the challenges posed by low-quality scenarios, inspired by vision-language models, this paper proposes a Visual Semantic Enhancement-guided Multi-Object Tracking framework (VSE-MOT). Specifically, we first design a tri-branch architecture that leverages a vision-language model to extract global visual semantic information from images and fuse it with query vectors. Subsequently, to further enhance the utilization of visual semantic information, we introduce the Multi-Object Tracking Adapter (MOT-Adapter) and the Visual Semantic Fusion Module (VSFM). The MOT-Adapter adapts the extracted global visual semantic information to suit multi-object tracking tasks, while the VSFM improves the efficacy of feature fusion. Through extensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in real-world low-quality video scenarios. Its tracking performance metrics outperform those of existing methods by approximately 8% to 20%, while maintaining robust performance in conventional scenarios.

Improving Anomalous Sound Detection with Attribute-aware Representation from Domain-adaptive Pre-training

Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) is often formulated as a machine attribute classification task, a strategy necessitated by the common scenario where only normal data is available for training. However, the exhaustive collection of machine attribute labels is laborious and impractical. To address the challenge of missing attribute labels, this paper proposes an agglomerative hierarchical clustering method for the assignment of pseudo-attribute labels using representations derived from a domain-adaptive pre-trained model, which are expected to capture machine attribute characteristics. We then apply model adaptation to this pre-trained model through supervised fine-tuning for machine attribute classification, resulting in a new state-of-the-art performance. Evaluation on the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2025 Challenge dataset demonstrates that our proposed approach yields significant performance gains, ultimately outperforming our previous top-ranking system in the challenge.

MEAN-RIR: Multi-Modal Environment-Aware Network for Robust Room Impulse Response Estimation

This paper presents a Multi-Modal Environment-Aware Network (MEAN-RIR), which uses an encoder-decoder framework to predict room impulse response (RIR) based on multi-level environmental information from audio, visual, and textual sources. Specifically, reverberant speech capturing room acoustic properties serves as the primary input, which is combined with panoramic images and text descriptions as supplementary inputs. Each input is processed by its respective encoder, and the outputs are fed into cross-attention modules to enable effective interaction between different modalities. The MEAN-RIR decoder generates two distinct components: the first component captures the direct sound and early reflections, while the second produces masks that modulate learnable filtered noise to synthesize the late reverberation. These two components are mixed to reconstruct the final RIR. The results show that MEAN-RIR significantly improves RIR estimation, with notable gains in acoustic parameters.

EGGCodec: A Robust Neural Encodec Framework for EGG Reconstruction and F0 Extraction

This letter introduces EGGCodec, a robust neural Encodec framework engineered for electroglottography (EGG) signal reconstruction and F0 extraction. We propose a multi-scale frequency-domain loss function to capture the nuanced relationship between original and reconstructed EGG signals, complemented by a time-domain correlation loss to improve generalization and accuracy. Unlike conventional Encodec models that extract F0 directly from features, EGGCodec leverages reconstructed EGG signals, which more closely correspond to F0. By removing the conventional GAN discriminator, we streamline EGGCodec's training process without compromising efficiency, incurring only negligible performance degradation. Trained on a widely used EGG-inclusive dataset, extensive evaluations demonstrate that EGGCodec outperforms state-of-the-art F0 extraction schemes, reducing mean absolute error (MAE) from 14.14 Hz to 13.69 Hz, and improving voicing decision error (VDE) by 38.2\%. Moreover, extensive ablation experiments validate the contribution of each component of EGGCodec.

Exploring Speaker Diarization with Mixture of Experts

In this paper, we propose a novel neural speaker diarization system using memory-aware multi-speaker embedding with sequence-to-sequence architecture (NSD-MS2S), which integrates a memory-aware multi-speaker embedding module with a sequence-to-sequence architecture. The system leverages a memory module to enhance speaker embeddings and employs a Seq2Seq framework to efficiently map acoustic features to speaker labels. Additionally, we explore the application of mixture of experts in speaker diarization, and introduce a Shared and Soft Mixture of Experts (SS-MoE) module to further mitigate model bias and enhance performance. Incorporating SS-MoE leads to the extended model NSD-MS2S-SSMoE. Experiments on multiple complex acoustic datasets, including CHiME-6, DiPCo, Mixer 6 and DIHARD-III evaluation sets, demonstrate meaningful improvements in robustness and generalization. The proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results, showcasing their effectiveness in challenging real-world scenarios.