SAIL: Perceptual Quality-Aware Rate Control for Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming streams cloud-rendered frames under strict motion-to-photon latency, yet its at-scale viability is increasingly constrained by bandwidth cost: in our study of the T cloud gaming platform, bandwidth accounts for 30-60% of total operating expense. This high bandwidth consumption stems from a fidelity-first objective of making the stream perceptually indistinguishable from local gameplay. It drives production systems toward best-effort bitrate allocation that pushes the encoder to the highest rate allowed by congestion control. However, the bitrate-perception relationship saturates: beyond a frame-dependent perceptually lossless threshold, additional bits yield negligible perceptual improvement, creating systematic redundant quality that wastes bandwidth. We present SAIL, a production quality-aware rate control system with the goal of achieving perceptually lossless quality while avoiding unnecessary bandwidth waste. SAIL adopts a post-encoding architecture to enable millisecond-scale feedback at near-zero overhead. It comprises three key designs: (i) an encoder-driven quality assessment model that leverages zero-cost encoder outputs for real-time quality estimation; (ii) a hybrid rate control mechanism that balances steady-state adaptation with dynamic spike absorption; and (iii) a network-aware strategy that coordinates with congestion control to prevent capacity underestimation. SAIL has been fully deployed on the T cloud gaming platform and reduces bandwidth consumption by 44.27% and end-to-end latency by 8.37% without degrading perceived quality, serving tens of millions of users and accumulating billions of hours of total gameplay.

Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models for Visual Navigation Assistance

We address vision-language-driven indoor navigation to assist visually impaired individuals in reaching a target location using images and natural language guidance. Traditional navigation systems are ineffective indoors due to the lack of precise location data. Our approach integrates vision and language models to generate step-by-step navigational instructions, enhancing accessibility and independence. We fine-tune the BLIP-2 model with Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on a manually annotated indoor navigation dataset. We propose an evaluation metric that refines the BERT F1 score by emphasizing directional and sequential variables, providing a more comprehensive measure of navigational performance. After applying LoRA, the model significantly improved in generating directional instructions, overcoming limitations in the original BLIP-2 model.

Data-Efficient Biomedical In-Context Learning: A Diversity-Enhanced Submodular Perspective

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has leveraged their in-context learning (ICL) abilities to enable quick adaptation to unseen biomedical NLP tasks. By incorporating only a few input-output examples into prompts, LLMs can rapidly perform these new tasks. While the impact of these demonstrations on LLM performance has been extensively studied, most existing approaches prioritize representativeness over diversity when selecting examples from large corpora. To address this gap, we propose Dual-Div, a diversity-enhanced data-efficient framework for demonstration selection in biomedical ICL. Dual-Div employs a two-stage retrieval and ranking process: First, it identifies a limited set of candidate examples from a corpus by optimizing both representativeness and diversity (with optional annotation for unlabeled data). Second, it ranks these candidates against test queries to select the most relevant and non-redundant demonstrations. Evaluated on three biomedical NLP tasks (named entity recognition (NER), relation extraction (RE), and text classification (TC)) using LLaMA 3.1 and Qwen 2.5 for inference, along with three retrievers (BGE-Large, BMRetriever, MedCPT), Dual-Div consistently outperforms baselines-achieving up to 5% higher macro-F1 scores-while demonstrating robustness to prompt permutations and class imbalance. Our findings establish that diversity in initial retrieval is more critical than ranking-stage optimization, and limiting demonstrations to 3-5 examples maximizes performance efficiency.

Automating Expert-Level Medical Reasoning Evaluation of Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into clinical decision-making, ensuring transparent and trustworthy reasoning is essential. However, existing evaluation strategies of LLMs' medical reasoning capability either suffer from unsatisfactory assessment or poor scalability, and a rigorous benchmark remains lacking. To address this, we introduce MedThink-Bench, a benchmark designed for rigorous, explainable, and scalable assessment of LLMs' medical reasoning. MedThink-Bench comprises 500 challenging questions across ten medical domains, each annotated with expert-crafted step-by-step rationales. Building on this, we propose LLM-w-Ref, a novel evaluation framework that leverages fine-grained rationales and LLM-as-a-Judge mechanisms to assess intermediate reasoning with expert-level fidelity while maintaining scalability. Experiments show that LLM-w-Ref exhibits a strong positive correlation with expert judgments. Benchmarking twelve state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that smaller models (e.g., MedGemma-27B) can surpass larger proprietary counterparts (e.g., OpenAI-o3). Overall, MedThink-Bench offers a foundational tool for evaluating LLMs' medical reasoning, advancing their safe and responsible deployment in clinical practice.