Click-to-Ask: An AI Live Streaming Assistant with Offline Copywriting and Online Interactive QA

Live streaming commerce has become a prominent form of broadcasting in the modern era. To facilitate more efficient and convenient product promotions for streamers, we present Click-to-Ask, an AI-driven assistant for live streaming commerce with complementary offline and online components. The offline module processes diverse multimodal product information, transforming complex inputs into structured product data and generating compliant promotional copywriting. During live broadcasts, the online module enables real-time responses to viewer inquiries by allowing streamers to click on questions and leveraging both the structured product information generated by the offline module and an event-level historical memory maintained in a streaming architecture. This system significantly reduces the time needed for promotional preparation, enhances content engagement, and enables prompt interaction with audience inquiries, ultimately improving the effectiveness of live streaming commerce. On our collected dataset of TikTok live stream frames, the proposed method achieves a Question Recognition Accuracy of 0.913 and a Response Quality score of 0.876, demonstrating considerable potential for practical application. The video demonstration can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mWIXK-SWhiE.

IntroSVG: Learning from Rendering Feedback for Text-to-SVG Generation via an Introspective Generator-Critic Framework

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are central to digital design due to their inherent scalability and editability. Despite significant advancements in content generation enabled by Visual Language Models (VLMs), existing text-to-SVG generation methods are limited by a core challenge: the autoregressive training process does not incorporate visual perception of the final rendered image, which fundamentally constrains generation quality. To address this limitation, we propose an Introspective SVG Generation Framework (IntroSVG). At its core, the framework instantiates a unified VLM that operates in a closed loop, assuming dual roles of both generator and critic. Specifically, through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), the model learns to draft SVGs and to provide feedback on their rendered outputs; moreover, we systematically convert early-stage failures into high-quality error-correction training data, thereby enhancing model robustness. Subsequently, we leverage a high-capacity teacher VLM to construct a preference dataset and further align the generator's policy through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). During inference, the optimized generator and critic operate collaboratively in an iterative "generate-review-refine" cycle, starting from imperfect intermediate drafts to autonomously improve output quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across several key evaluation metrics, generating SVGs with more complex structures, stronger semantic alignment, and greater editability. These results corroborate the effectiveness of incorporating explicit visual feedback into the generation loop.

MemEmo: Evaluating Emotion in Memory Systems of Agents

Memory systems address the challenge of context loss in Large Language Model during prolonged interactions. However, compared to human cognition, the efficacy of these systems in processing emotion-related information remains inconclusive. To address this gap, we propose an emotion-enhanced memory evaluation benchmark to assess the performance of mainstream and state-of-the-art memory systems in handling affective information. We developed the \textbf{H}uman-\textbf{L}ike \textbf{M}emory \textbf{E}motion (\textbf{HLME}) dataset, which evaluates memory systems across three dimensions: emotional information extraction, emotional memory updating, and emotional memory question answering. Experimental results indicate that none of the evaluated systems achieve robust performance across all three tasks. Our findings provide an objective perspective on the current deficiencies of memory systems in processing emotional memories and suggest a new trajectory for future research and system optimization.

HumanOrbit: 3D Human Reconstruction as 360° Orbit Generation

We present a method for generating a full 360° orbit video around a person from a single input image. Existing methods typically adapt image-based diffusion models for multi-view synthesis, but yield inconsistent results across views and with the original identity. In contrast, recent video diffusion models have demonstrated their ability in generating photorealistic results that align well with the given prompts. Inspired by these results, we propose HumanOrbit, a video diffusion model for multi-view human image generation. Our approach enables the model to synthesize continuous camera rotations around the subject, producing geometrically consistent novel views while preserving the appearance and identity of the person. Using the generated multi-view frames, we further propose a reconstruction pipeline that recovers a textured mesh of the subject. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of HumanOrbit for multi-view image generation and that the reconstructed 3D models exhibit superior completeness and fidelity compared to those from state-of-the-art baselines.

Hierarchical Audio-Visual-Proprioceptive Fusion for Precise Robotic Manipulation

Existing robotic manipulation methods primarily rely on visual and proprioceptive observations, which may struggle to infer contact-related interaction states in partially observable real-world environments. Acoustic cues, by contrast, naturally encode rich interaction dynamics during contact, yet remain underexploited in current multimodal fusion literature. Most multimodal fusion approaches implicitly assume homogeneous roles across modalities, and thus design flat and symmetric fusion structures. However, this assumption is ill-suited for acoustic signals, which are inherently sparse and contact-driven. To achieve precise robotic manipulation through acoustic-informed perception, we propose a hierarchical representation fusion framework that progressively integrates audio, vision, and proprioception. Our approach first conditions visual and proprioceptive representations on acoustic cues, and then explicitly models higher-order cross-modal interactions to capture complementary dependencies among modalities. The fused representation is leveraged by a diffusion-based policy to directly generate continuous robot actions from multimodal observations. The combination of end-to-end learning and hierarchical fusion structure enables the policy to exploit task-relevant acoustic information while mitigating interference from less informative modalities. The proposed method has been evaluated on real-world robotic manipulation tasks, including liquid pouring and cabinet opening. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal fusion frameworks, particularly in scenarios where acoustic cues provide task-relevant information not readily available from visual observations alone. Furthermore, a mutual information analysis is conducted to interpret the effect of audio cues in robotic manipulation via multimodal fusion.

Step 3.5 Flash: Open Frontier-Level Intelligence with 11B Active Parameters

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

Robust Categorical Data Clustering Guided by Multi-Granular Competitive Learning

Data set composed of categorical features is very common in big data analysis tasks. Since categorical features are usually with a limited number of qualitative possible values, the nested granular cluster effect is prevalent in the implicit discrete distance space of categorical data. That is, data objects frequently overlap in space or subspace to form small compact clusters, and similar small clusters often form larger clusters. However, the distance space cannot be well-defined like the Euclidean distance due to the qualitative categorical data values, which brings great challenges to the cluster analysis of categorical data. In view of this, we design a Multi-Granular Competitive Penalization Learning (MGCPL) algorithm to allow potential clusters to interactively tune themselves and converge in stages with different numbers of naturally compact clusters. To leverage MGCPL, we also propose a Cluster Aggregation strategy based on MGCPL Encoding (CAME) to first encode the data objects according to the learned multi-granular distributions, and then perform final clustering on the embeddings. It turns out that the proposed MGCPL-guided Categorical Data Clustering (MCDC) approach is competent in automatically exploring the nested distribution of multi-granular clusters and highly robust to categorical data sets from various domains. Benefiting from its linear time complexity, MCDC is scalable to large-scale data sets and promising in pre-partitioning data sets or compute nodes for boosting distributed computing. Extensive experiments with statistical evidence demonstrate its superiority compared to state-of-the-art counterparts on various real public data sets.

Uncovering and Understanding FPR Manipulation Attack in Industrial IoT Networks

In the network security domain, due to practical issues -- including imbalanced data and heterogeneous legitimate network traffic -- adversarial attacks in machine learning-based NIDSs have been viewed as attack packets misclassified as benign. Due to this prevailing belief, the possibility of (maliciously) perturbed benign packets being misclassified as attack has been largely ignored. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is not only theoretically possible, but also a particular threat to NIDS. In particular, we uncover a practical cyberattack, FPR manipulation attack (FPA), especially targeting industrial IoT networks, where domain-specific knowledge of the widely used MQTT protocol is exploited and a systematic simple packet-level perturbation is performed to alter the labels of benign traffic samples without employing traditional gradient-based or non-gradient-based methods. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that this novel attack results in a success rate of 80.19% to 100%. In addition, while estimating impacts in the Security Operations Center, we observe that even a small fraction of false positive alerts, irrespective of different budget constraints and alert traffic intensities, can increase the delay of genuine alerts investigations up to 2 hr in a single day under normal operating conditions. Furthermore, a series of relevant statistical and XAI analyses is conducted to understand the key factors behind this remarkable success. Finally, we explore the effectiveness of the FPA packets to enhance models' robustness through adversarial training and investigate the changes in decision boundaries accordingly.

NorwAI's Large Language Models: Technical Report

Norwegian, spoken by approximately five million people, remains underrepresented in many of the most significant breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP). To address this gap, the NorLLM team at NorwAI has developed a family of models specifically tailored to Norwegian and other Scandinavian languages, building on diverse Transformer-based architectures such as GPT, Mistral, Llama2, Mixtral and Magistral. These models are either pretrained from scratch or continually pretrained on 25B - 88.45B tokens, using a Norwegian-extended tokenizer and advanced post-training strategies to optimize performance, enhance robustness, and improve adaptability across various real-world tasks. Notably, instruction-tuned variants (e.g., Mistral-7B-Instruct and Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct) showcase strong assistant-style capabilities, underscoring their potential for practical deployment in interactive and domain-specific applications. The NorwAI large language models are openly available to Nordic organizations, companies and students for both research and experimental use. This report provides detailed documentation of the model architectures, training data, tokenizer design, fine-tuning strategies, deployment, and evaluations.

NextFlow: Unified Sequential Modeling Activates Multimodal Understanding and Generation

We present NextFlow, a unified decoder-only autoregressive transformer trained on 6 trillion interleaved text-image discrete tokens. By leveraging a unified vision representation within a unified autoregressive architecture, NextFlow natively activates multimodal understanding and generation capabilities, unlocking abilities of image editing, interleaved content and video generation. Motivated by the distinct nature of modalities - where text is strictly sequential and images are inherently hierarchical - we retain next-token prediction for text but adopt next-scale prediction for visual generation. This departs from traditional raster-scan methods, enabling the generation of 1024x1024 images in just 5 seconds - orders of magnitude faster than comparable AR models. We address the instabilities of multi-scale generation through a robust training recipe. Furthermore, we introduce a prefix-tuning strategy for reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate that NextFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance among unified models and rivals specialized diffusion baselines in visual quality.