Say What You Mean: Natural Language Access Control with Large Language Models for Internet of Things

Access control in the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly complex, as policies must account for dynamic and contextual factors such as time, location, user behavior, and environmental conditions. However, existing platforms either offer only coarse-grained controls or rely on rigid rule matching, making them ill-suited for semantically rich or ambiguous access scenarios. Moreover, the policy authoring process remains fragmented: domain experts describe requirements in natural language, but developers must manually translate them into code, introducing semantic gaps and potential misconfiguration. In this work, we present LACE, the Language-based Access Control Engine, a hybrid framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to bridge the gap between human intent and machine-enforceable logic. LACE combines prompt-guided policy generation, retrieval-augmented reasoning, and formal validation to support expressive, interpretable, and verifiable access control. It enables users to specify policies in natural language, automatically translates them into structured rules, validates semantic correctness, and makes access decisions using a hybrid LLM-rule-based engine. We evaluate LACE in smart home environments through extensive experiments. LACE achieves 100% correctness in verified policy generation and up to 88% decision accuracy with 0.79 F1-score using DeepSeek-V3, outperforming baselines such as GPT-3.5 and Gemini. The system also demonstrates strong scalability under increasing policy volume and request concurrency. Our results highlight LACE's potential to enable secure, flexible, and user-friendly access control across real-world IoT platforms.

RAG-Zeval: Towards Robust and Interpretable Evaluation on RAG Responses through End-to-End Rule-Guided Reasoning

Robust evaluation is critical for deploying trustworthy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. However, current LLM-based evaluation frameworks predominantly rely on directly prompting resource-intensive models with complex multi-stage prompts, underutilizing models' reasoning capabilities and introducing significant computational cost. In this paper, we present RAG-Zeval (RAG-Zero Evaluator), a novel end-to-end framework that formulates faithfulness and correctness evaluation as a rule-guided reasoning task. Our approach trains evaluators with reinforcement learning, facilitating compact models to generate comprehensive and sound assessments with detailed explanation in one-pass. We introduce a ranking-based outcome reward mechanism, using preference judgments rather than absolute scores, to address the challenge of obtaining precise pointwise reward signals. To this end, we synthesize the ranking references by generating quality-controlled responses with zero human annotation. Experiments demonstrate RAG-Zeval's superior performance, achieving the strongest correlation with human judgments and outperforming baselines that rely on LLMs with 10-100 times more parameters. Our approach also exhibits superior interpretability in response evaluation.

SwarmThinkers: Learning Physically Consistent Atomic KMC Transitions at Scale

Can a scientific simulation system be physically consistent, interpretable by design, and scalable across regimes--all at once? Despite decades of progress, this trifecta remains elusive. Classical methods like Kinetic Monte Carlo ensure thermodynamic accuracy but scale poorly; learning-based methods offer efficiency but often sacrifice physical consistency and interpretability. We present SwarmThinkers, a reinforcement learning framework that recasts atomic-scale simulation as a physically grounded swarm intelligence system. Each diffusing particle is modeled as a local decision-making agent that selects transitions via a shared policy network trained under thermodynamic constraints. A reweighting mechanism fuses learned preferences with transition rates, preserving statistical fidelity while enabling interpretable, step-wise decision making. Training follows a centralized-training, decentralized-execution paradigm, allowing the policy to generalize across system sizes, concentrations, and temperatures without retraining. On a benchmark simulating radiation-induced Fe-Cu alloy precipitation, SwarmThinkers is the first system to achieve full-scale, physically consistent simulation on a single A100 GPU, previously attainable only via OpenKMC on a supercomputer. It delivers up to 4963x (3185x on average) faster computation with 485x lower memory usage. By treating particles as decision-makers, not passive samplers, SwarmThinkers marks a paradigm shift in scientific simulation--one that unifies physical consistency, interpretability, and scalability through agent-driven intelligence.

DrugPilot: LLM-based Parameterized Reasoning Agent for Drug Discovery

In the field of AI4Science, large-scale language models (LLMs) show great potential to parse complex scientific semantics, integrate cross-disciplinary knowledge, and assist critical task research. However, in the field of drug discovery, despite the optimization through professional data pre-training, context window expansion, and internet search, the existing LLMs are still facing challenges such as massive multi-modal and heterogeneous data processing, domain knowledge dynamic updating delay, and insufficient confidence in predicting the results of complex computational tasks. To address these challenges, we propose the DrugPilot, an LLM-based agent with parameterized reasoning for drug discovery. DrugPilot addresses key limitations of traditional end-to-end LLM prediction approaches through its parametric inference architecture. This agent system supports major phases of the drug discovery pipeline, facilitating automated planning and execution of multi-stage research tasks. To address the critical challenge of multi-modal drug data analysis (incorporating both public datasets and user-submitted data), we developed an interactive parameterized memory pool. This innovative component standardizes real-world drug data into parametric representations, simultaneously enabling efficient knowledge retrieval in multi-turn dialogue while mitigating the information loss inherent in text-based data transmission. Additionally, we created a drug instruct dataset across 8 essential drug discovery tasks for model fine-tuning and evaluation. Based on the Berkeley function calling evaluation framework, DrugPilot demonstrated the most advanced tool calling capabilities on our drug discovery tool instruction dataset, outperforming existing agents (e.g., ReAct, LoT). Specifically, it achieves task completion rates of 98.0%, 93.5%, and 64.0% on simple, multiple, and multi-turn tasks, respectively.

Optimizing Multi-Round Enhanced Training in Diffusion Models for Improved Preference Understanding

Generative AI has significantly changed industries by enabling text-driven image generation, yet challenges remain in achieving high-resolution outputs that align with fine-grained user preferences. Consequently, multi-round interactions are necessary to ensure the generated images meet expectations. Previous methods enhanced prompts via reward feedback but did not optimize over a multi-round dialogue dataset. In this work, we present a Visual Co-Adaptation (VCA) framework incorporating human-in-the-loop feedback, leveraging a well-trained reward model aligned with human preferences. Using a diverse multi-turn dialogue dataset, our framework applies multiple reward functions, such as diversity, consistency, and preference feedback, while fine-tuning the diffusion model through LoRA, thus optimizing image generation based on user input. We also construct multi-round dialogue datasets of prompts and image pairs aligned with user intent. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, significantly improving image consistency and alignment with user intent. Our approach consistently surpasses competing models in user satisfaction, especially in multi-turn dialogue scenarios.

The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Image Denoising Challenge Report

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2025 Image Denoising Challenge ({\sigma} = 50), highlighting the proposed methodologies and corresponding results. The primary objective is to develop a network architecture capable of achieving high-quality denoising performance, quantitatively evaluated using PSNR, without constraints on computational complexity or model size. The task assumes independent additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with a fixed noise level of 50. A total of 290 participants registered for the challenge, with 20 teams successfully submitting valid results, providing insights into the current state-of-the-art in image denoising.

The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Single-Image Efficient Super-Resolution (ESR). The challenge aimed to advance the development of deep models that optimize key computational metrics, i.e., runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while achieving a PSNR of at least 26.90 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_valid}$ dataset and 26.99 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_test}$ dataset. A robust participation saw \textbf{244} registered entrants, with \textbf{43} teams submitting valid entries. This report meticulously analyzes these methods and results, emphasizing groundbreaking advancements in state-of-the-art single-image ESR techniques. The analysis highlights innovative approaches and establishes benchmarks for future research in the field.

MARS: Memory-Enhanced Agents with Reflective Self-improvement

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in the field of natural language processing, but they still face challenges such as continuous decision-making, lack of long-term memory, and limited context windows in dynamic environments. To address these issues, this paper proposes an innovative framework Memory-Enhanced Agents with Reflective Self-improvement. The MARS framework comprises three agents: the User, the Assistant, and the Checker. By integrating iterative feedback, reflective mechanisms, and a memory optimization mechanism based on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, it significantly enhances the agents capabilities in handling multi-tasking and long-span information.

A Survey on fMRI-based Brain Decoding for Reconstructing Multimodal Stimuli

In daily life, we encounter diverse external stimuli, such as images, sounds, and videos. As research in multimodal stimuli and neuroscience advances, fMRI-based brain decoding has become a key tool for understanding brain perception and its complex cognitive processes. Decoding brain signals to reconstruct stimuli not only reveals intricate neural mechanisms but also drives progress in AI, disease treatment, and brain-computer interfaces. Recent advancements in neuroimaging and image generation models have significantly improved fMRI-based decoding. While fMRI offers high spatial resolution for precise brain activity mapping, its low temporal resolution and signal noise pose challenges. Meanwhile, techniques like GANs, VAEs, and Diffusion Models have enhanced reconstructed image quality, and multimodal pre-trained models have boosted cross-modal decoding tasks. This survey systematically reviews recent progress in fMRI-based brain decoding, focusing on stimulus reconstruction from passive brain signals. It summarizes datasets, relevant brain regions, and categorizes existing methods by model structure. Additionally, it evaluates model performance and discusses their effectiveness. Finally, it identifies key challenges and proposes future research directions, offering valuable insights for the field. For more information and resources related to this survey, visit https://github.com/LpyNow/BrainDecodingImage.

DiffAD: A Unified Diffusion Modeling Approach for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has rapidly emerged as a promising approach toward achieving full autonomy. However, existing E2E-AD systems typically adopt a traditional multi-task framework, addressing perception, prediction, and planning tasks through separate task-specific heads. Despite being trained in a fully differentiable manner, they still encounter issues with task coordination, and the system complexity remains high. In this work, we introduce DiffAD, a novel diffusion probabilistic model that redefines autonomous driving as a conditional image generation task. By rasterizing heterogeneous targets onto a unified bird's-eye view (BEV) and modeling their latent distribution, DiffAD unifies various driving objectives and jointly optimizes all driving tasks in a single framework, significantly reducing system complexity and harmonizing task coordination. The reverse process iteratively refines the generated BEV image, resulting in more robust and realistic driving behaviors. Closed-loop evaluations in Carla demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, achieving a new state-of-the-art Success Rate and Driving Score. The code will be made publicly available.