RAP: Runtime-Adaptive Pruning for LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) excel at language understanding and generation, but their enormous computational and memory requirements hinder deployment. Compression offers a potential solution to mitigate these constraints. However, most existing methods rely on fixed heuristics and thus fail to adapt to runtime memory variations or heterogeneous KV-cache demands arising from diverse user requests. To address these limitations, we propose RAP, an elastic pruning framework driven by reinforcement learning (RL) that dynamically adjusts compression strategies in a runtime-aware manner. Specifically, RAP dynamically tracks the evolving ratio between model parameters and KV-cache across practical execution. Recognizing that FFNs house most parameters, whereas parameter -light attention layers dominate KV-cache formation, the RL agent retains only those components that maximize utility within the current memory budget, conditioned on instantaneous workload and device state. Extensive experiments results demonstrate that RAP outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, marking the first time to jointly consider model weights and KV-cache on the fly.

A Personalized Conversational Benchmark: Towards Simulating Personalized Conversations

We present PersonaConvBench, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating personalized reasoning and generation in multi-turn conversations with large language models (LLMs). Unlike existing work that focuses on either personalization or conversational structure in isolation, PersonaConvBench integrates both, offering three core tasks: sentence classification, impact regression, and user-centric text generation across ten diverse Reddit-based domains. This design enables systematic analysis of how personalized conversational context shapes LLM outputs in realistic multi-user scenarios. We benchmark several commercial and open-source LLMs under a unified prompting setup and observe that incorporating personalized history yields substantial performance improvements, including a 198 percent relative gain over the best non-conversational baseline in sentiment classification. By releasing PersonaConvBench with evaluations and code, we aim to support research on LLMs that adapt to individual styles, track long-term context, and produce contextually rich, engaging responses.

Neural Video Compression with Context Modulation

Efficient video coding is highly dependent on exploiting the temporal redundancy, which is usually achieved by extracting and leveraging the temporal context in the emerging conditional coding-based neural video codec (NVC). Although the latest NVC has achieved remarkable progress in improving the compression performance, the inherent temporal context propagation mechanism lacks the ability to sufficiently leverage the reference information, limiting further improvement. In this paper, we address the limitation by modulating the temporal context with the reference frame in two steps. Specifically, we first propose the flow orientation to mine the inter-correlation between the reference frame and prediction frame for generating the additional oriented temporal context. Moreover, we introduce the context compensation to leverage the oriented context to modulate the propagated temporal context generated from the propagated reference feature. Through the synergy mechanism and decoupling loss supervision, the irrelevant propagated information can be effectively eliminated to ensure better context modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that our codec achieves on average 22.7% bitrate reduction over the advanced traditional video codec H.266/VVC, and offers an average 10.1% bitrate saving over the previous state-of-the-art NVC DCVC-FM. The code is available at https://github.com/Austin4USTC/DCMVC.

Multi-Level Aware Preference Learning: Enhancing RLHF for Complex Multi-Instruction Tasks

RLHF has emerged as a predominant approach for aligning artificial intelligence systems with human preferences, demonstrating exceptional and measurable efficacy in instruction following tasks; however, it exhibits insufficient compliance capabilities when confronted with complex multi-instruction tasks. Conventional approaches rely heavily on human annotation or more sophisticated large language models, thereby introducing substantial resource expenditure or potential bias concerns. Meanwhile, alternative synthetic methods that augment standard preference datasets often compromise the model's semantic quality. Our research identifies a critical oversight in existing techniques, which predominantly focus on comparing responses while neglecting valuable latent signals embedded within prompt inputs, and which only focus on preference disparities at the intra-sample level, while neglecting to account for the inter-sample level preference differentials that exist among preference data. To leverage these previously neglected indicators, we propose a novel Multi-level Aware Preference Learning (MAPL) framework, capable of enhancing multi-instruction capabilities. Specifically, for any given response in original preference data pairs, we construct varied prompts with a preference relation under different conditions, in order to learn intra-sample level preference disparities. Furthermore, for any given original preference pair, we synthesize multi-instruction preference pairs to capture preference discrepancies at the inter-sample level. Building on the two datasets constructed above, we consequently devise two sophisticated training objective functions. Subsequently, our framework integrates seamlessly into both Reward Modeling and Direct Preference Optimization paradigms. Through rigorous evaluation across multiple benchmarks, we empirically validate the efficacy of our framework.

Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model in RLHF

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback relies on reward models to align large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward hacking, wherein policy learning exploits flaws in the trained reward model to maximize reward scores without genuinely aligning with human preferences. A significant example of such reward hacking is length bias, where reward models usually favor longer responses irrespective of actual response quality. Previous works on length bias have notable limitations, these approaches either mitigate bias without characterizing the bias form, or simply assume a linear length-reward relation. To accurately model the intricate nature of length bias and facilitate more effective bias mitigation, we propose FiMi-RM (Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model in RLHF), a framework that autonomously learns and corrects underlying bias patterns. Our approach consists of three stages: First, we train a standard reward model which inherently contains length bias. Next, we deploy a lightweight fitting model to explicitly capture the non-linear relation between length and reward. Finally, we incorporate this learned relation into the reward model to debias. Experimental results demonstrate that FiMi-RM achieves a more balanced length-reward distribution. Furthermore, when applied to alignment algorithms, our debiased reward model improves length-controlled win rate and reduces verbosity without compromising its performance.

Exploring the Potential of SSL Models for Sound Event Detection

Self-supervised learning (SSL) models offer powerful representations for sound event detection (SED), yet their synergistic potential remains underexplored. This study systematically evaluates state-of-the-art SSL models to guide optimal model selection and integration for SED. We propose a framework that combines heterogeneous SSL representations (e.g., BEATs, HuBERT, WavLM) through three fusion strategies: individual SSL embedding integration, dual-modal fusion, and full aggregation. Experiments on the DCASE 2023 Task 4 Challenge reveal that dual-modal fusion (e.g., CRNN+BEATs+WavLM) achieves complementary performance gains, while CRNN+BEATs alone delivers the best results among individual SSL models. We further introduce normalized sound event bounding boxes (nSEBBs), an adaptive post-processing method that dynamically adjusts event boundary predictions, improving PSDS1 by up to 4% for standalone SSL models. These findings highlight the compatibility and complementarity of SSL architectures, providing guidance for task-specific fusion and robust SED system design.

A Survey on Data-Driven Modeling of Human Drivers' Lane-Changing Decisions

Lane-changing (LC) behavior, a critical yet complex driving maneuver, significantly influences driving safety and traffic dynamics. Traditional analytical LC decision (LCD) models, while effective in specific environments, often oversimplify behavioral heterogeneity and complex interactions, limiting their capacity to capture real LCD. Data-driven approaches address these gaps by leveraging rich empirical data and machine learning to decode latent decision-making patterns, enabling adaptive LCD modeling in dynamic environments. In light of the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the demand for data-driven models oriented towards connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of data-driven LCD models, with a particular focus on human drivers LC decision-making. It systematically reviews the modeling framework, covering data sources and preprocessing, model inputs and outputs, objectives, structures, and validation methods. This survey further discusses the opportunities and challenges faced by data-driven LCD models, including driving safety, uncertainty, as well as the integration and improvement of technical frameworks.

Augmented Deep Contexts for Spatially Embedded Video Coding

Most Neural Video Codecs (NVCs) only employ temporal references to generate temporal-only contexts and latent prior. These temporal-only NVCs fail to handle large motions or emerging objects due to limited contexts and misaligned latent prior. To relieve the limitations, we propose a Spatially Embedded Video Codec (SEVC), in which the low-resolution video is compressed for spatial references. Firstly, our SEVC leverages both spatial and temporal references to generate augmented motion vectors and hybrid spatial-temporal contexts. Secondly, to address the misalignment issue in latent prior and enrich the prior information, we introduce a spatial-guided latent prior augmented by multiple temporal latent representations. At last, we design a joint spatial-temporal optimization to learn quality-adaptive bit allocation for spatial references, further boosting rate-distortion performance. Experimental results show that our SEVC effectively alleviates the limitations in handling large motions or emerging objects, and also reduces 11.9% more bitrate than the previous state-of-the-art NVC while providing an additional low-resolution bitstream. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/EsakaK/SEVC.

Partition Map-Based Fast Block Partitioning for VVC Inter Coding

Among the new techniques of Versatile Video Coding (VVC), the quadtree with nested multi-type tree (QT+MTT) block structure yields significant coding gains by providing more flexible block partitioning patterns. However, the recursive partition search in the VVC encoder increases the encoder complexity substantially. To address this issue, we propose a partition map-based algorithm to pursue fast block partitioning in inter coding. Based on our previous work on partition map-based methods for intra coding, we analyze the characteristics of VVC inter coding, and thus improve the partition map by incorporating an MTT mask for early termination. Next, we develop a neural network that uses both spatial and temporal features to predict the partition map. It consists of several special designs including stacked top-down and bottom-up processing, quantization parameter modulation layers, and partitioning-adaptive warping. Furthermore, we present a dual-threshold decision scheme to achieve a fine-grained trade-off between complexity reduction and rate-distortion (RD) performance loss. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an average 51.30% encoding time saving with a 2.12% Bjontegaard Delta Bit Rate (BDBR) under the random access configuration.

Privacy Protection Against Personalized Text-to-Image Synthesis via Cross-image Consistency Constraints

The rapid advancement of diffusion models and personalization techniques has made it possible to recreate individual portraits from just a few publicly available images. While such capabilities empower various creative applications, they also introduce serious privacy concerns, as adversaries can exploit them to generate highly realistic impersonations. To counter these threats, anti-personalization methods have been proposed, which add adversarial perturbations to published images to disrupt the training of personalization models. However, existing approaches largely overlook the intrinsic multi-image nature of personalization and instead adopt a naive strategy of applying perturbations independently, as commonly done in single-image settings. This neglects the opportunity to leverage inter-image relationships for stronger privacy protection. Therefore, we advocate for a group-level perspective on privacy protection against personalization. Specifically, we introduce Cross-image Anti-Personalization (CAP), a novel framework that enhances resistance to personalization by enforcing style consistency across perturbed images. Furthermore, we develop a dynamic ratio adjustment strategy that adaptively balances the impact of the consistency loss throughout the attack iterations. Extensive experiments on the classical CelebHQ and VGGFace2 benchmarks show that CAP substantially improves existing methods.