AudioMarathon: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Long-Context Audio Understanding and Efficiency in Audio LLMs

Processing long-form audio is a major challenge for Large Audio Language models (LALMs). These models struggle with the quadratic cost of attention ($O(N^2)$) and with modeling long-range temporal dependencies. Existing audio benchmarks are built mostly from short clips and do not evaluate models in realistic long context settings. To address this gap, we introduce AudioMarathon, a benchmark designed to evaluate both understanding and inference efficiency on long-form audio. AudioMarathon provides a diverse set of tasks built upon three pillars: long-context audio inputs with durations ranging from 90.0 to 300.0 seconds, which correspond to encoded sequences of 2,250 to 7,500 audio tokens, respectively, full domain coverage across speech, sound, and music, and complex reasoning that requires multi-hop inference. We evaluate state-of-the-art LALMs and observe clear performance drops as audio length grows. We also study acceleration techniques and analyze the trade-offs of token pruning and KV cache eviction. The results show large gaps across current LALMs and highlight the need for better temporal reasoning and memory-efficient architectures. We believe AudioMarathon will drive the audio and multimodal research community to develop more advanced audio understanding models capable of solving complex audio tasks.

Text2Move: Text-to-moving sound generation via trajectory prediction and temporal alignment

Human auditory perception is shaped by moving sound sources in 3D space, yet prior work in generative sound modelling has largely been restricted to mono signals or static spatial audio. In this work, we introduce a framework for generating moving sounds given text prompts in a controllable fashion. To enable training, we construct a synthetic dataset that records moving sounds in binaural format, their spatial trajectories, and text captions about the sound event and spatial motion. Using this dataset, we train a text-to-trajectory prediction model that outputs the three-dimensional trajectory of a moving sound source given text prompts. To generate spatial audio, we first fine-tune a pre-trained text-to-audio generative model to output temporally aligned mono sound with the trajectory. The spatial audio is then simulated using the predicted temporally-aligned trajectory. Experimental evaluation demonstrates reasonable spatial understanding of the text-to-trajectory model. This approach could be easily integrated into existing text-to-audio generative workflow and extended to moving sound generation in other spatial audio formats.

Goal-Oriented Skill Abstraction for Offline Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Offline multi-task reinforcement learning aims to learn a unified policy capable of solving multiple tasks using only pre-collected task-mixed datasets, without requiring any online interaction with the environment. However, it faces significant challenges in effectively sharing knowledge across tasks. Inspired by the efficient knowledge abstraction observed in human learning, we propose Goal-Oriented Skill Abstraction (GO-Skill), a novel approach designed to extract and utilize reusable skills to enhance knowledge transfer and task performance. Our approach uncovers reusable skills through a goal-oriented skill extraction process and leverages vector quantization to construct a discrete skill library. To mitigate class imbalances between broadly applicable and task-specific skills, we introduce a skill enhancement phase to refine the extracted skills. Furthermore, we integrate these skills using hierarchical policy learning, enabling the construction of a high-level policy that dynamically orchestrates discrete skills to accomplish specific tasks. Extensive experiments on diverse robotic manipulation tasks within the MetaWorld benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of GO-Skill.

Synergizing Reinforcement Learning and Genetic Algorithms for Neural Combinatorial Optimization

Combinatorial optimization problems are notoriously challenging due to their discrete structure and exponentially large solution space. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have enabled the learning heuristics directly from data. However, DRL methods often suffer from limited exploration and susceptibility to local optima. On the other hand, evolutionary algorithms such as Genetic Algorithms (GAs) exhibit strong global exploration capabilities but are typically sample inefficient and computationally intensive. In this work, we propose the Evolutionary Augmentation Mechanism (EAM), a general and plug-and-play framework that synergizes the learning efficiency of DRL with the global search power of GAs. EAM operates by generating solutions from a learned policy and refining them through domain-specific genetic operations such as crossover and mutation. These evolved solutions are then selectively reinjected into the policy training loop, thereby enhancing exploration and accelerating convergence. We further provide a theoretical analysis that establishes an upper bound on the KL divergence between the evolved solution distribution and the policy distribution, ensuring stable and effective policy updates. EAM is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with state-of-the-art DRL solvers such as the Attention Model, POMO, and SymNCO. Extensive results on benchmark problems (e.g., TSP, CVRP, PCTSP, and OP) demonstrate that EAM significantly improves both solution quality and training efficiency over competitive baselines.

Segment Concealed Objects with Incomplete Supervision

Incompletely-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation (ISCOS) involves segmenting objects that seamlessly blend into their surrounding environments, utilizing incompletely annotated data, such as weak and semi-annotations, for model training. This task remains highly challenging due to (1) the limited supervision provided by the incompletely annotated training data, and (2) the difficulty of distinguishing concealed objects from the background, which arises from the intrinsic similarities in concealed scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the first unified method for ISCOS to address these challenges. To tackle the issue of incomplete supervision, we propose a unified mean-teacher framework, SEE, that leverages the vision foundation model, ``\emph{Segment Anything Model (SAM)}'', to generate pseudo-labels using coarse masks produced by the teacher model as prompts. To mitigate the effect of low-quality segmentation masks, we introduce a series of strategies for pseudo-label generation, storage, and supervision. These strategies aim to produce informative pseudo-labels, store the best pseudo-labels generated, and select the most reliable components to guide the student model, thereby ensuring robust network training. Additionally, to tackle the issue of intrinsic similarity, we design a hybrid-granularity feature grouping module that groups features at different granularities and aggregates these results. By clustering similar features, this module promotes segmentation coherence, facilitating more complete segmentation for both single-object and multiple-object images. We validate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple ISCOS tasks, and experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, SEE can serve as a plug-and-play solution, enhancing the performance of existing models.

A Fast and Lightweight Model for Causal Audio-Visual Speech Separation

Audio-visual speech separation (AVSS) aims to extract a target speech signal from a mixed signal by leveraging both auditory and visual (lip movement) cues. However, most existing AVSS methods exhibit complex architectures and rely on future context, operating offline, which renders them unsuitable for real-time applications. Inspired by the pipeline of RTFSNet, we propose a novel streaming AVSS model, named Swift-Net, which enhances the causal processing capabilities required for real-time applications. Swift-Net adopts a lightweight visual feature extraction module and an efficient fusion module for audio-visual integration. Additionally, Swift-Net employs Grouped SRUs to integrate historical information across different feature spaces, thereby improving the utilization efficiency of historical information. We further propose a causal transformation template to facilitate the conversion of non-causal AVSS models into causal counterparts. Experiments on three standard benchmark datasets (LRS2, LRS3, and VoxCeleb2) demonstrated that under causal conditions, our proposed Swift-Net exhibited outstanding performance, highlighting the potential of this method for processing speech in complex environments.

Zero-Trust Foundation Models: A New Paradigm for Secure and Collaborative Artificial Intelligence for Internet of Things

This paper focuses on Zero-Trust Foundation Models (ZTFMs), a novel paradigm that embeds zero-trust security principles into the lifecycle of foundation models (FMs) for Internet of Things (IoT) systems. By integrating core tenets, such as continuous verification, least privilege access (LPA), data confidentiality, and behavioral analytics into the design, training, and deployment of FMs, ZTFMs can enable secure, privacy-preserving AI across distributed, heterogeneous, and potentially adversarial IoT environments. We present the first structured synthesis of ZTFMs, identifying their potential to transform conventional trust-based IoT architectures into resilient, self-defending ecosystems. Moreover, we propose a comprehensive technical framework, incorporating federated learning (FL), blockchain-based identity management, micro-segmentation, and trusted execution environments (TEEs) to support decentralized, verifiable intelligence at the network edge. In addition, we investigate emerging security threats unique to ZTFM-enabled systems and evaluate countermeasures, such as anomaly detection, adversarial training, and secure aggregation. Through this analysis, we highlight key open research challenges in terms of scalability, secure orchestration, interpretable threat attribution, and dynamic trust calibration. This survey lays a foundational roadmap for secure, intelligent, and trustworthy IoT infrastructures powered by FMs.

SoloSpeech: Enhancing Intelligibility and Quality in Target Speech Extraction through a Cascaded Generative Pipeline

Target Speech Extraction (TSE) aims to isolate a target speaker's voice from a mixture of multiple speakers by leveraging speaker-specific cues, typically provided as auxiliary audio (a.k.a. cue audio). Although recent advancements in TSE have primarily employed discriminative models that offer high perceptual quality, these models often introduce unwanted artifacts, reduce naturalness, and are sensitive to discrepancies between training and testing environments. On the other hand, generative models for TSE lag in perceptual quality and intelligibility. To address these challenges, we present SoloSpeech, a novel cascaded generative pipeline that integrates compression, extraction, reconstruction, and correction processes. SoloSpeech features a speaker-embedding-free target extractor that utilizes conditional information from the cue audio's latent space, aligning it with the mixture audio's latent space to prevent mismatches. Evaluated on the widely-used Libri2Mix dataset, SoloSpeech achieves the new state-of-the-art intelligibility and quality in target speech extraction and speech separation tasks while demonstrating exceptional generalization on out-of-domain data and real-world scenarios.

AudioTrust: Benchmarking the Multifaceted Trustworthiness of Audio Large Language Models

The rapid advancement and expanding applications of Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) demand a rigorous understanding of their trustworthiness. However, systematic research on evaluating these models, particularly concerning risks unique to the audio modality, remains largely unexplored. Existing evaluation frameworks primarily focus on the text modality or address only a restricted set of safety dimensions, failing to adequately account for the unique characteristics and application scenarios inherent to the audio modality. We introduce AudioTrust-the first multifaceted trustworthiness evaluation framework and benchmark specifically designed for ALLMs. AudioTrust facilitates assessments across six key dimensions: fairness, hallucination, safety, privacy, robustness, and authentication. To comprehensively evaluate these dimensions, AudioTrust is structured around 18 distinct experimental setups. Its core is a meticulously constructed dataset of over 4,420 audio/text samples, drawn from real-world scenarios (e.g., daily conversations, emergency calls, voice assistant interactions), specifically designed to probe the multifaceted trustworthiness of ALLMs. For assessment, the benchmark carefully designs 9 audio-specific evaluation metrics, and we employ a large-scale automated pipeline for objective and scalable scoring of model outputs. Experimental results reveal the trustworthiness boundaries and limitations of current state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source ALLMs when confronted with various high-risk audio scenarios, offering valuable insights for the secure and trustworthy deployment of future audio models. Our platform and benchmark are available at https://github.com/JusperLee/AudioTrust.

Time-Frequency-Based Attention Cache Memory Model for Real-Time Speech Separation

Existing causal speech separation models often underperform compared to non-causal models due to difficulties in retaining historical information. To address this, we propose the Time-Frequency Attention Cache Memory (TFACM) model, which effectively captures spatio-temporal relationships through an attention mechanism and cache memory (CM) for historical information storage. In TFACM, an LSTM layer captures frequency-relative positions, while causal modeling is applied to the time dimension using local and global representations. The CM module stores past information, and the causal attention refinement (CAR) module further enhances time-based feature representations for finer granularity. Experimental results showed that TFACM achieveed comparable performance to the SOTA TF-GridNet-Causal model, with significantly lower complexity and fewer trainable parameters. For more details, visit the project page: https://cslikai.cn/TFACM/.