What makes Reasoning Models Different? Follow the Reasoning Leader for Efficient Decoding

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong reasoning performance by emitting long chains of thought. Yet, these verbose traces slow down inference and often drift into unnecessary detail, known as the overthinking phenomenon. To better understand LRMs' behavior, we systematically analyze the token-level misalignment between reasoning and non-reasoning models. While it is expected that their primary difference lies in the stylistic "thinking cues", LRMs uniquely exhibit two pivotal, previously under-explored phenomena: a Global Misalignment Rebound, where their divergence from non-reasoning models persists or even grows as response length increases, and more critically, a Local Misalignment Diminish, where the misalignment concentrates at the "thinking cues" each sentence starts with but rapidly declines in the remaining of the sentence. Motivated by the Local Misalignment Diminish, we propose FoReaL-Decoding, a collaborative fast-slow thinking decoding method for cost-quality trade-off. In FoReaL-Decoding, a Leading model leads the first few tokens for each sentence, and then a weaker draft model completes the following tokens to the end of each sentence. FoReaL-Decoding adopts a stochastic gate to smoothly interpolate between the small and the large model. On four popular math-reasoning benchmarks (AIME24, GPQA-Diamond, MATH500, AMC23), FoReaL-Decoding reduces theoretical FLOPs by 30 to 50% and trims CoT length by up to 40%, while preserving 86 to 100% of model performance. These results establish FoReaL-Decoding as a simple, plug-and-play route to controllable cost-quality trade-offs in reasoning-centric tasks.

Diarization-Aware Multi-Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition via Large Language Models

Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (MS-ASR) faces significant challenges in transcribing overlapped speech, a task critical for applications like meeting transcription and conversational analysis. While serialized output training (SOT)-style methods serve as common solutions, they often discard absolute timing information, limiting their utility in time-sensitive scenarios. Leveraging recent advances in large language models (LLMs) for conversational audio processing, we propose a novel diarization-aware multi-speaker ASR system that integrates speaker diarization with LLM-based transcription. Our framework processes structured diarization inputs alongside frame-level speaker and semantic embeddings, enabling the LLM to generate segment-level transcriptions. Experiments demonstrate that the system achieves robust performance in multilingual dyadic conversations and excels in complex, high-overlap multi-speaker meeting scenarios. This work highlights the potential of LLMs as unified back-ends for joint speaker-aware segmentation and transcription.

ChronoTailor: Harnessing Attention Guidance for Fine-Grained Video Virtual Try-On

Video virtual try-on aims to seamlessly replace the clothing of a person in a source video with a target garment. Despite significant progress in this field, existing approaches still struggle to maintain continuity and reproduce garment details. In this paper, we introduce ChronoTailor, a diffusion-based framework that generates temporally consistent videos while preserving fine-grained garment details. By employing a precise spatio-temporal attention mechanism to guide the integration of fine-grained garment features, ChronoTailor achieves robust try-on performance. First, ChronoTailor leverages region-aware spatial guidance to steer the evolution of spatial attention and employs an attention-driven temporal feature fusion mechanism to generate more continuous temporal features. This dual approach not only enables fine-grained local editing but also effectively mitigates artifacts arising from video dynamics. Second, ChronoTailor integrates multi-scale garment features to preserve low-level visual details and incorporates a garment-pose feature alignment to ensure temporal continuity during dynamic motion. Additionally, we collect StyleDress, a new dataset featuring intricate garments, varied environments, and diverse poses, offering advantages over existing public datasets, and will be publicly available for research. Extensive experiments show that ChronoTailor maintains spatio-temporal continuity and preserves garment details during motion, significantly outperforming previous methods.

Infi-Med: Low-Resource Medical MLLMs with Robust Reasoning Evaluation

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising prospects in healthcare, particularly for addressing complex medical tasks, supporting multidisciplinary treatment (MDT), and enabling personalized precision medicine. However, their practical deployment faces critical challenges in resource efficiency, diagnostic accuracy, clinical considerations, and ethical privacy. To address these limitations, we propose Infi-Med, a comprehensive framework for medical MLLMs that introduces three key innovations: (1) a resource-efficient approach through curating and constructing high-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets with minimal sample requirements, with a forward-looking design that extends to both pretraining and posttraining phases; (2) enhanced multimodal reasoning capabilities for cross-modal integration and clinical task understanding; and (3) a systematic evaluation system that assesses model performance across medical modalities and task types. Our experiments demonstrate that Infi-Med achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in general medical reasoning while maintaining rapid adaptability to clinical scenarios. The framework establishes a solid foundation for deploying MLLMs in real-world healthcare settings by balancing model effectiveness with operational constraints.

LMCD: Language Models are Zeroshot Cognitive Diagnosis Learners

Cognitive Diagnosis (CD) has become a critical task in AI-empowered education, supporting personalized learning by accurately assessing students' cognitive states. However, traditional CD models often struggle in cold-start scenarios due to the lack of student-exercise interaction data. Recent NLP-based approaches leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown promise by utilizing textual features but fail to fully bridge the gap between semantic understanding and cognitive profiling. In this work, we propose Language Models as Zeroshot Cognitive Diagnosis Learners (LMCD), a novel framework designed to handle cold-start challenges by harnessing large language models (LLMs). LMCD operates via two primary phases: (1) Knowledge Diffusion, where LLMs generate enriched contents of exercises and knowledge concepts (KCs), establishing stronger semantic links; and (2) Semantic-Cognitive Fusion, where LLMs employ causal attention mechanisms to integrate textual information and student cognitive states, creating comprehensive profiles for both students and exercises. These representations are efficiently trained with off-the-shelf CD models. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that LMCD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both exercise-cold and domain-cold settings. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/TAL-auroraX/LMCD

Multi-Channel Sequence-to-Sequence Neural Diarization: Experimental Results for The MISP 2025 Challenge

This paper describes the speaker diarization system developed for the Multimodal Information-Based Speech Processing (MISP) 2025 Challenge. First, we utilize the Sequence-to-Sequence Neural Diarization (S2SND) framework to generate initial predictions using single-channel audio. Then, we extend the original S2SND framework to create a new version, Multi-Channel Sequence-to-Sequence Neural Diarization (MC-S2SND), which refines the initial results using multi-channel audio. The final system achieves a diarization error rate (DER) of 8.09% on the evaluation set of the competition database, ranking first place in the speaker diarization task of the MISP 2025 Challenge.

DISCO Balances the Scales: Adaptive Domain- and Difficulty-Aware Reinforcement Learning on Imbalanced Data

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Among RLHF methods, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has gained attention for its simplicity and strong performance, notably eliminating the need for a learned value function. However, GRPO implicitly assumes a balanced domain distribution and uniform semantic alignment across groups - assumptions that rarely hold in real-world datasets. When applied to multi-domain, imbalanced data, GRPO disproportionately optimizes for dominant domains, neglecting underrepresented ones and resulting in poor generalization and fairness. We propose Domain-Informed Self-Consistency Policy Optimization (DISCO), a principled extension to GRPO that addresses inter-group imbalance with two key innovations. Domain-aware reward scaling counteracts frequency bias by reweighting optimization based on domain prevalence. Difficulty-aware reward scaling leverages prompt-level self-consistency to identify and prioritize uncertain prompts that offer greater learning value. Together, these strategies promote more equitable and effective policy learning across domains. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and skewed training distributions show that DISCO improves generalization, outperforms existing GRPO variants by 5% on Qwen3 models, and sets new state-of-the-art results on multi-domain alignment benchmarks.

Toward Theoretical Insights into Diffusion Trajectory Distillation via Operator Merging

Diffusion trajectory distillation methods aim to accelerate sampling in diffusion models, which produce high-quality outputs but suffer from slow sampling speeds. These methods train a student model to approximate the multi-step denoising process of a pretrained teacher model in a single step, enabling one-shot generation. However, theoretical insights into the trade-off between different distillation strategies and generative quality remain limited, complicating their optimization and selection. In this work, we take a first step toward addressing this gap. Specifically, we reinterpret trajectory distillation as an operator merging problem in the linear regime, where each step of the teacher model is represented as a linear operator acting on noisy data. These operators admit a clear geometric interpretation as projections and rescalings corresponding to the noise schedule. During merging, signal shrinkage occurs as a convex combination of operators, arising from both discretization and limited optimization time of the student model. We propose a dynamic programming algorithm to compute the optimal merging strategy that maximally preserves signal fidelity. Additionally, we demonstrate the existence of a sharp phase transition in the optimal strategy, governed by data covariance structures. Our findings enhance the theoretical understanding of diffusion trajectory distillation and offer practical insights for improving distillation strategies.

Anomaly Detection Based on Critical Paths for Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are notoriously hard to understand and difficult to defend. Extracting representative paths (including the neuron activation values and the connections between neurons) from DNNs using software engineering approaches has recently shown to be a promising approach in interpreting the decision making process of blackbox DNNs, as the extracted paths are often effective in capturing essential features. With this in mind, this work investigates a novel approach that extracts critical paths from DNNs and subsequently applies the extracted paths for the anomaly detection task, based on the observation that outliers and adversarial inputs do not usually induce the same activation pattern on those paths as normal (in-distribution) inputs. In our approach, we first identify critical detection paths via genetic evolution and mutation. Since different paths in a DNN often capture different features for the same target class, we ensemble detection results from multiple paths by integrating random subspace sampling and a voting mechanism. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our experimental results suggest that our method not only outperforms them, but it is also suitable for the detection of a broad range of anomaly types with high accuracy.

Safe-Sora: Safe Text-to-Video Generation via Graphical Watermarking

The explosive growth of generative video models has amplified the demand for reliable copyright preservation of AI-generated content. Despite its popularity in image synthesis, invisible generative watermarking remains largely underexplored in video generation. To address this gap, we propose Safe-Sora, the first framework to embed graphical watermarks directly into the video generation process. Motivated by the observation that watermarking performance is closely tied to the visual similarity between the watermark and cover content, we introduce a hierarchical coarse-to-fine adaptive matching mechanism. Specifically, the watermark image is divided into patches, each assigned to the most visually similar video frame, and further localized to the optimal spatial region for seamless embedding. To enable spatiotemporal fusion of watermark patches across video frames, we develop a 3D wavelet transform-enhanced Mamba architecture with a novel spatiotemporal local scanning strategy, effectively modeling long-range dependencies during watermark embedding and retrieval. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply state space models to watermarking, opening new avenues for efficient and robust watermark protection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Safe-Sora achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of video quality, watermark fidelity, and robustness, which is largely attributed to our proposals. We will release our code upon publication.