Community-Aware Assessment of Social Textual Engagement and Resonance: A Human-Centric Perspective on User-Generated Content Evaluation

Traditional Video Quality Assessment (VQA) focuses narrowly on aesthetic fidelity, overlooking the complex social dynamics that define quality in User-Generated Content (UGC). In this work, we propose a paradigm shift from signal-centric metrics to human-centric resonance assessment. We introduce CASTER (Community-Aware Assessment of Social Textual Engagement and Resonance), a new task that evaluates whether a UGC item achieves positive community resonance based on its multimodal attributes rather than visual quality alone. To address this, we present MEDEA (Multimodal Engagement-Driven Evaluation Architecture), which introduces a novel Social Chain-of-Thought (Social-CoT) mechanism. Unlike traditional logical CoT, Social-CoT performs multimodal perspective-taking, instantiating diverse viewer personas to simulate collective cognitive and emotional reactions (i.e., the "community mind") before deriving a quality judgment. MEDEA is trained via a two-stage approach involving supervised fine-tuning and process-supervised reinforcement learning with Social Alignment Reward to ensure reasoning paths are grounded in authentic human social cognition. To support this task, we release CASTER-Bench, a comprehensive human-annotated benchmark covering diverse UGC categories. Experiments demonstrate that MEDEA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CASTER-Bench while providing interpretable and empathetic reasoning paths that align with real community feedback.

When Does Deep RL Beat Calibrated Baselines? A Benchmark Study on Adaptive Resource Control

A properly calibrated rule-based autoscaler can beat every one of six mainstream deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms on cost across every workload we test - so when, if ever, does DRL actually help? We study this in RLScale-Bench, a reproducible benchmark and evaluation protocol for DRL on adaptive resource control, where an agent allocates compute to a dynamic workload under cost and service-level constraints. We evaluate PPO, DQN, A2C, SAC, TD3, and DDPG under matched architectures, training budgets, and reward functions against a calibrated rule-based baseline across six workload patterns and five seeds (240 runs), instantiate the benchmark on Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, and probe distribution-shift generalization. Three findings challenge common assumptions: (i) the calibrated controller achieves the lowest cost on all six workloads, though it trails the best RL agents on bursty and flash traffic; (ii) discrete-action algorithms outperform continuous-action ones by one to two orders of magnitude in constraint violations due to action-space mismatch; and (iii) no single algorithm dominates across workloads, with rankings shifting by up to four positions. The bottleneck in RL-based resource control is not algorithm selection but baseline calibration, reward engineering, and realistic evaluation protocols.

Sub-JEPA: Subspace Gaussian Regularization for Stable End-to-End World Models

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide a simpleframework for learning world models by predicting future latent representations.However, JEPA training is subject to a bias-variance tradeoff.Without sufficient structural constraints, excessive representationalvariance causes the model to collapse to trivial solutions.The recent LeWorldModel (LeWM) shows that this issue can be alleviated bysimply constraining latent embeddings with an isotropic Gaussian prior.However, latent representations inherently lie on low-dimensional manifoldswithin a high-dimensional ambient space, and enforcing an isotropic Gaussianprior directly in this ambient space introduces an overly strong bias.In this work, we propose ame, which seeks a favorable operatingpoint on the bias-variance frontier by applying Gaussian constraints inmultiple random subspaces rather than in the originalembedding space.This design relaxes the global constraint while preserving itsanti-collapse effect, leading to a better balance between trainingstability and representation flexibility.Extensive experiments across fourcontinuous-control environments demonstrate that consistentlyoutperforms LeWM with very clear margins.Our method is simple yet effective, and serves as a strong baseline for future JEPA-based world model research.fdefinedeeemodeThe code is available at https://github.com/intcomp/Sub-JEPA.

Robust Explanations for User Trust in Enterprise NLP Systems

Robust explanations are increasingly required for user trust in enterprise NLP, yet pre-deployment validation is difficult in the common case of black-box deployment (API-only access) where representation-based explainers are infeasible and existing studies provide limited guidance on whether explanations remain stable under real user noise, especially when organizations migrate from encoder classifiers to decoder LLMs. To close this gap, we propose a unified black-box robustness evaluation framework for token-level explanations based on leave-one-out occlusion, and operationalize explanation robustness with top-token flip rate under realistic perturbations (swap, deletion, shuffling, and back-translation) at multiple severity levels. Using this protocol, we conduct a systematic cross-architecture comparison across three benchmark datasets and six models spanning encoder and decoder families (BERT, RoBERTa, Qwen 7B/14B, Llama 8B/70B; 64,800 cases). We find that decoder LLMs produce substantially more stable explanations than encoder baselines (73% lower flip rates on average), and that stability improves with model scale (44% gain from 7B to 70B). Finally, we relate robustness improvements to inference cost, yielding a practical cost-robustness tradeoff curve that supports model and explanation selection prior to deployment in compliance-sensitive applications.

LLM-HYPER: Generative CTR Modeling for Cold-Start Ad Personalization via LLM-Based Hypernetworks

On online advertising platforms, newly introduced promotional ads face the cold-start problem, as they lack sufficient user feedback for model training. In this work, we propose LLM-HYPER, a novel framework that treats large language models (LLMs) as hypernetworks to directly generate the parameters of the click-through rate (CTR) estimator in a training-free manner. LLM-HYPER uses few-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting over multimodal ad content (text and images) to infer feature-wise model weights for a linear CTR predictor. By retrieving semantically similar past campaigns via CLIP embeddings and formatting them into prompt-based demonstrations, the LLM learns to reason about customer intent, feature influence, and content relevance. To ensure numerical stability and serviceability, we introduce normalization and calibration techniques that align the generated weights with production-ready CTR distributions. Extensive offline experiments show that LLM-HYPER significantly outperforms cold-start baselines in NDCG$@10$ by 55.9\%. Our real-world online A/B test on one of the top e-commerce platforms in the U.S. demonstrates the strong performance of LLM-HYPER, which drastically reduces the cold-start period and achieves competitive performance. LLM-HYPER has been successfully deployed in production.

SeGPruner: Semantic-Geometric Visual Token Pruner for 3D Question Answering

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely adopted for 3D question answering (3D QA). In typical pipelines, visual tokens extracted from multiple viewpoints are concatenated with language tokens and jointly processed by a large language model (LLM) for inference. However, aggregating multi-view observations inevitably introduces severe token redundancy, leading to an overly large visual token set that significantly hinders inference efficiency under constrained token budgets. Visual token pruning has emerged as a prevalent strategy to address this issue. Nevertheless, most existing pruners are primarily tailored to 2D inputs or rely on indirect geometric cues, which limits their ability to explicitly retain semantically critical objects and maintain sufficient spatial coverage for robust 3D reasoning. In this paper, we propose SeGPruner, a semantic-aware and geometry-guided token reduction framework for efficient 3D QA with multi-view images. Specifically, SeGPruner first preserves semantically salient tokens through an attention-based importance module (Saliency-aware Token Selector), ensuring that object-critical evidence is retained. It then complements these tokens with spatially diverse ones via a geometry-guided selector (Geometry-aware Token Diversifier), which jointly considers semantic relevance and 3D geometric distance. This cooperation between saliency preservation and geometry-guided diversification balances object-level evidence and global scene coverage under aggressive token reduction. Extensive experiments on ScanQA and OpenEQA demonstrate that SeGPruner substantially improves inference efficiency, reducing the visual token budget by 91% and inference latency by 86%, while maintaining competitive performance in 3D reasoning tasks.

InstanceRSR: Real-World Super-Resolution via Instance-Aware Representation Alignment

Existing real-world super-resolution (RSR) methods based on generative priors have achieved remarkable progress in producing high-quality and globally consistent reconstructions. However, they often struggle to recover fine-grained details of diverse object instances in complex real-world scenes. This limitation primarily arises because commonly adopted denoising losses (e.g., MSE) inherently favor global consistency while neglecting instance-level perception and restoration. To address this issue, we propose InstanceRSR, a novel RSR framework that jointly models semantic information and introduces instance-level feature alignment. Specifically, we employ low-resolution (LR) images as global consistency guidance while jointly modeling image data and semantic segmentation maps to enforce semantic relevance during sampling. Moreover, we design an instance representation learning module to align the diffusion latent space with the instance latent space, enabling instance-aware feature alignment, and further incorporate a scale alignment mechanism to enhance fine-grained perception and detail recovery. Benefiting from these designs, our approach not only generates photorealistic details but also preserves semantic consistency at the instance level. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmarks demonstrate that InstanceRSR significantly outperforms existing methods in both quantitative metrics and visual quality, achieving new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Lyapunov Stable Graph Neural Flow

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations in both topology and features, making the learning of robust representations a critical challenge. In this work, we bridge GNNs with control theory to introduce a novel defense framework grounded in integer- and fractional-order Lyapunov stability. Unlike conventional strategies that rely on resource-heavy adversarial training or data purification, our approach fundamentally constrains the underlying feature-update dynamics of the GNN. We propose an adaptive, learnable Lyapunov function paired with a novel projection mechanism that maps the network's state into a stable space, thereby offering theoretically provable stability guarantees. Notably, this mechanism is orthogonal to existing defenses, allowing for seamless integration with techniques like adversarial training to achieve cumulative robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Lyapunov-stable graph neural flows substantially outperform base neural flows and state-of-the-art baselines across standard benchmarks and various adversarial attack scenarios.

Adaptive Memory Admission Control for LLM Agents

LLM-based agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support multi-session reasoning and interaction, yet current systems provide little control over what information is retained. In practice, agents either accumulate large volumes of conversational content, including hallucinated or obsolete facts, or depend on opaque, fully LLM-driven memory policies that are costly and difficult to audit. As a result, memory admission remains a poorly specified and weakly controlled component in agent architectures. To address this gap, we propose Adaptive Memory Admission Control (A-MAC), a framework that treats memory admission as a structured decision problem. A-MAC decomposes memory value into five complementary and interpretable factors: future utility, factual confidence, semantic novelty, temporal recency, and content type prior. The framework combines lightweight rule-based feature extraction with a single LLM-assisted utility assessment, and learns domain-adaptive admission policies through cross-validated optimization. This design enables transparent and efficient control over long-term memory. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show that A-MAC achieves a superior precision-recall tradeoff, improving F1 to 0.583 while reducing latency by 31% compared to state-of-the-art LLM-native memory systems. Ablation results identify content type prior as the most influential factor for reliable memory admission. These findings demonstrate that explicit and interpretable admission control is a critical design principle for scalable and reliable memory in LLM-based agents.

LLMs as Orchestrators: Constraint-Compliant Multi-Agent Optimization for Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems must optimize multiple objectives while satisfying hard business constraints such as fairness and coverage. For example, an e-commerce platform may require every recommendation list to include items from multiple sellers and at least one newly listed product; violating such constraints--even once--is unacceptable in production. Prior work on multi-objective recommendation and recent LLM-based recommender agents largely treat constraints as soft penalties or focus on item scoring and interaction, leading to frequent violations in real-world deployments. How to leverage LLMs for coordinating constrained optimization in recommendation systems remains underexplored. We propose DualAgent-Rec, an LLM-coordinated dual-agent framework for constrained multi-objective e-commerce recommendation. The framework separates optimization into an Exploitation Agent that prioritizes accuracy under hard constraints and an Exploration Agent that promotes diversity through unconstrained Pareto search. An LLM-based coordinator adaptively allocates resources between agents based on optimization progress and constraint satisfaction, while an adaptive epsilon-relaxation mechanism guarantees feasibility of final solutions. Experiments on the Amazon Reviews 2023 dataset demonstrate that DualAgent-Rec achieves 100% constraint satisfaction and improves Pareto hypervolume by 4-6% over strong baselines, while maintaining competitive accuracy-diversity trade-offs. These results indicate that LLMs can act as effective orchestration agents for deployable and constraint-compliant recommendation systems.