Scalable Counterfactual Risk Estimation for Rare Events in Longitudinal Data

Estimating the causal effect of time-varying treatments on survival outcomes in large observational studies is computationally demanding, particularly when outcomes are rare. While g-formula-based methods such as the iterative conditional expectation (ICE) estimator provide a principled framework for longitudinal causal inference, they become computationally expensive, especially when bootstrap-based variance estimation is required. In addition, outcome rarity at each time point induces severe class imbalance, leading to instability and convergence issues in logistic regression and related models. To address these challenges, we propose a principled subsampling and reweighting strategy for longitudinal survival data that can be applied to a range of existing causal effect estimators in this setting, including the ICE estimator. The proposed method substantially reduces computational burden while preserving consistency and improving estimation stability in rare-outcome settings. We evaluate the method through simulations and validate it using a large-scale EHR cohort study on social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH) and suicide risk, demonstrating its effectiveness for modeling rare outcomes in longitudinal data.

Structural Dilemmas and Developmental Pathways of Legal Argument Mining in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Against the backdrop of rapid advances in artificial intelligence, legal argument mining has emerged as an important research area linking legal texts with intelligent analysis, carrying significant theoretical and practical implications. Existing studies have primarily developed along three dimensions: data, technology, and theory. At the data level, raw legal texts and annotated corpora constitute the foundational resources. At the technological level, research paradigms have evolved from rule-based systems and traditional machine learning to large language models (LLMs). At the theoretical level, argumentation theory and legal dogmatics provide important references for modeling argumentation structures. However, despite ongoing progress, the overall development of legal argument mining remains relatively slow. Building on a systematic review of existing research, this study conducts an in-depth analysis and finds that this is due not only to data scarcity or technical limitations, but more fundamentally to the lack of a structured representational approach that reconciles theoretical expressiveness with computational feasibility. Specifically, this challenge manifests in dilemmas in data standardization, obstacles to effective modeling, and limitations in domain adaptation. In response, the study proposes several key directions for future research. It aims to provide a reframing of key problems and a pathway for future development in legal argument mining, while leaving specific models and implementation schemes for further investigation.

Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian from Effective Field Theory: Quasiparticle Band Narrowing from Frozen Core Dynamics

Kohn-Sham (KS) eigenvalues are routinely compared with angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES) and used as input for many-body methods, yet density functional theory (DFT) assigns them no physical meaning. For alkali and alkaline-earth metals, KS bandwidths overestimate ARPES measurements by 20-35%, a discrepancy that persists across all exchange-correlation functionals. We construct an effective field theory (EFT) of the inhomogeneous electron gas and show that two conditions imply KS bands are the quasiparticle bands, up to a frozen-core renormalization factor zcore: a scale separation between core excitation energies and the valence Fermi energy, and an approximate Galilean invariance of the uniform electron gas confirmed by diagrammatic Monte Carlo. This factor reflects dynamical core excitations that conventional pseudopotentials freeze out and no static potential can capture. The correction 1-zcore reaches 20-35% for alkali metals but falls below 5% for Al and Si, explaining both the failure and success of KS band theory. We derive a closed-form post-SCF formula and validate it for Li, Na, K, Ca, Mg, Al, and Si; the predicted quasiparticle bands resolve the long-standing ARPES bandwidth discrepancy, matching embedded dynamical mean-field theory at negligible cost. This work also exemplifies first-principles agentic science, a direction particularly suited to the AGI-for-Science paradigm: an LLM-co-developed derivation with controlled approximations, verified symbolically and against a few experiments, becomes a deterministic harness for agentic scale-out, resolving simultaneously the LLM audit bottleneck and the non-falsifiability of fit-based AI-for-science.

Decentralized Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Collaborative Exploration for Indoor and Outdoor 3D Environments

Heterogeneous multi-robot systems feature significant adaptability for complex environments. However, effective collaboration that fully exploits the robots' potential remains a core challenge. This paper proposes a decentralized collaborative framework for heterogeneous multi-robot systems to autonomously explore indoor and outdoor 3D environments. First, a basic perception map that integrates terrain and observation metrics is designed. Improved supervoxel segmentation is developed to simplify the map structure and form a high-level representation that supports lightweight communication. Second, the traversal and observation capabilities of heterogeneous robots are modeled to evaluate the requirements of task views derived from incomplete supervoxels. These task views are grouped by requirements and clustered to streamline assignment. Subsequently, the view-cluster assignment is formulated as a heterogeneous multi-depot multi-traveling salesman problem (HMDMTSP) that incorporates constraints between view-cluster requirements and robot capabilities. An improved genetic algorithm is developed to efficiently solve this problem while ensuring global consistency. Based on the assignments, redundant views within clusters are eliminated to refine exploration routes. Finally, conflicts between robots' motion paths are resolved. Simulations and field experiments in cluttered indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate that our approach effectively coordinates exploration tasks among heterogeneous robots, achieving superior exploration efficiency and communication savings compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

SEATrack: Simple, Efficient, and Adaptive Multimodal Tracker

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) in multimodal tracking reveals a concerning trend where recent performance gains are often achieved at the cost of inflated parameter budgets, which fundamentally erodes PEFT's efficiency promise. In this work, we introduce SEATrack, a Simple, Efficient, and Adaptive two-stream multimodal tracker that tackles this performance-efficiency dilemma from two complementary perspectives. We first prioritize cross-modal alignment of matching responses, an underexplored yet pivotal factor that we argue is essential for breaking the trade-off. Specifically, we observe that modality-specific biases in existing two-stream methods generate conflicting matching attention maps, thereby hindering effective joint representation learning. To mitigate this, we propose AMG-LoRA, which seamlessly integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for domain adaptation with Adaptive Mutual Guidance (AMG) to dynamically refine and align attention maps across modalities. We then depart from conventional local fusion approaches by introducing a Hierarchical Mixture of Experts (HMoE) that enables efficient global relation modeling, effectively balancing expressiveness and computational efficiency in cross-modal fusion. Equipped with these innovations, SEATrack advances notable progress over state-of-the-art methods in balancing performance with efficiency across RGB-T, RGB-D, and RGB-E tracking tasks. \href{https://github.com/AutoLab-SAI-SJTU/SEATrack}{\textcolor{cyan}{Code is available}}.

Not All Tokens See Equally: Perception-Grounded Policy Optimization for Large Vision-Language Models

While Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), prevailing frameworks suffer from a foundational methodological flaw: by distributing identical advantages across all generated tokens, these methods inherently dilute the learning signals essential for optimizing the critical, visually-grounded steps of multimodal reasoning. To bridge this gap, we formulate \textit{Token Visual Dependency}, quantifying the causal information gain of visual inputs via the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between visual-conditioned and text-only predictive distributions. Revealing that this dependency is highly sparse and semantically pivotal, we introduce Perception-Grounded Policy Optimization (PGPO), which is a novel fine-grained credit assignment framework that dynamically reshapes advantages at the token level. Through a threshold-gated, mass-conserving mechanism, PGPO actively amplifies learning signals for visually-dependent tokens while suppressing gradient noise from linguistic priors. Extensive experiments based on the Qwen2.5-VL series across seven challenging multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that PGPO boosts models by 18.7% on average. Both theoretical and empirical analyses confirm that PGPO effectively reduces gradient variance, prevents training collapse, and acts as a potent regularizer for robust, perception-grounded multimodal reasoning. Code will be published on https://github.com/Yzk1114/PGPO.

APEX-Searcher: Augmenting LLMs' Search Capabilities through Agentic Planning and Execution

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), based on large language models (LLMs), serves as a vital approach to retrieving and leveraging external knowledge in various domain applications. When confronted with complex multi-hop questions, single-round retrieval is often insufficient for accurate reasoning and problem solving. To enhance search capabilities for complex tasks, most existing works integrate multi-round iterative retrieval with reasoning processes via end-to-end training. While these approaches significantly improve problem-solving performance, they are still faced with challenges in task reasoning and model training, especially ambiguous retrieval execution paths and sparse rewards in end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) process, leading to inaccurate retrieval results and performance degradation. To address these issues, in this paper, we proposes APEX-Searcher, a novel Agentic Planning and Execution framework to augment LLM search capabilities. Specifically, we introduce a two-stage agentic framework that decouples the retrieval process into planning and execution: It first employs RL with decomposition-specific rewards to optimize strategic planning; Built on the sub-task decomposition, it then applies supervised fine-tuning on high-quality multi-hop trajectories to equip the model with robust iterative sub-task execution capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves significant improvements in both multi-hop RAG and task planning performances across multiple benchmarks.

Guidelines for the Annotation and Visualization of Legal Argumentation Structures in Chinese Judicial Decisions

This guideline proposes a systematic and operational annotation framework for representing the structure of legal argumentation in judicial decisions. Grounded in theories of legal reasoning and argumentation, the framework aims to reveal the logical organization of judicial reasoning and to provide a reliable data foundation for computational analysis. At the proposition level, the guideline distinguishes four types of propositions: general normative propositions, specific normative propositions, general factual propositions, and specific factual propositions. At the relational level, five types of relations are defined to capture argumentative structures: support, attack, joint, match, and identity. These relations represent positive and negative argumentative connections, conjunctive reasoning structures, the correspondence between legal norms and case facts, and semantic equivalence between propositions. The guideline further specifies formal representation rules and visualization conventions for both basic and nested structures, enabling consistent graphical representation of complex argumentation patterns. In addition, it establishes a standardized annotation workflow and consistency control mechanisms to ensure reproducibility and reliability of the annotated data. By providing a clear conceptual model, formal representation rules, and practical annotation procedures, this guideline offers methodological support for large-scale analysis of judicial reasoning and for future research in legal argument mining, computational modeling of legal reasoning, and AI-assisted legal analysis.

Global-Local Dual Perception for MLLMs in High-Resolution Text-Rich Image Translation

Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT) aims to translate text embedded in images in the source-language into target-language, requiring synergistic integration of visual perception and linguistic understanding. Existing TIMT methods, whether cascaded pipelines or end-to-end multimodal large language models (MLLMs),struggle with high-resolution text-rich images due to cluttered layouts, diverse fonts, and non-textual distractions, resulting in text omission, semantic drift, and contextual inconsistency. To address these challenges, we propose GLoTran, a global-local dual visual perception framework for MLLM-based TIMT. GLoTran integrates a low-resolution global image with multi-scale region-level text image slices under an instruction-guided alignment strategy, conditioning MLLMs to maintain scene-level contextual consistency while faithfully capturing fine-grained textual details. Moreover, to realize this dual-perception paradigm, we construct GLoD, a large-scale text-rich TIMT dataset comprising 510K high-resolution global-local image-text pairs covering diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GLoTran substantially improves translation completeness and accuracy over state-of-the-art MLLMs, offering a new paradigm for fine-grained TIMT under high-resolution and text-rich conditions.

Flexible Entropy Control in RLVR with Gradient-Preserving Perspective

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a critical method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, continuous training often leads to policy entropy collapse, characterized by a rapid decay in entropy that results in premature overconfidence, reduced output diversity, and vanishing gradient norms that inhibit learning. Gradient-Preserving Clipping is a primary factor influencing these dynamics, but existing mitigation strategies are largely static and lack a framework connecting clipping mechanisms to precise entropy control. This paper proposes reshaping entropy control in RL from the perspective of Gradient-Preserving Clipping. We first theoretically and empirically verify the contributions of specific importance sampling ratio regions to entropy growth and reduction. Leveraging these findings, we introduce a novel regulation mechanism using dynamic clipping threshold to precisely manage entropy. Furthermore, we design and evaluate dynamic entropy control strategies, including increase-then-decrease, decrease-increase-decrease, and oscillatory decay. Experimental results demonstrate that these strategies effectively mitigate entropy collapse, and achieve superior performance across multiple benchmarks.