Double Machine Learning of Continuous Treatment Effects with General Instrumental Variables

Estimating causal effects of continuous treatments is a common problem in practice, for example, in studying dose-response functions. Classical analyses typically assume that all confounders are fully observed, whereas in real-world applications, unmeasured confounding often persists. In this article, we propose a novel framework for local identification of dose-response functions using instrumental variables, thereby mitigating bias induced by unobserved confounders. We introduce the concept of a uniform regular weighting function and consider covering the treatment space with a finite collection of open sets. On each of these sets, such a weighting function exists, allowing us to identify the dose-response function locally within the corresponding region. For estimation, we develop an augmented inverse probability weighting score for continuous treatments under a debiased machine learning framework with instrumental variables. We further establish the asymptotic properties when the dose-response function is estimated via kernel regression or empirical risk minimization. Finally, we conduct both simulation and empirical studies to assess the finite-sample performance of the proposed methods.

SoulSeek: Exploring the Use of Social Cues in LLM-based Information Seeking

Social cues, which convey others' presence, behaviors, or identities, play a crucial role in human information seeking by helping individuals judge relevance and trustworthiness. However, existing LLM-based search systems primarily rely on semantic features, creating a misalignment with the socialized cognition underlying natural information seeking. To address this gap, we explore how the integration of social cues into LLM-based search influences users' perceptions, experiences, and behaviors. Focusing on social media platforms that are beginning to adopt LLM-based search, we integrate design workshops, the implementation of the prototype system (SoulSeek), a between-subjects study, and mixed-method analyses to examine both outcome- and process-level findings. The workshop informs the prototype's cue-integrated design. The study shows that social cues improve perceived outcomes and experiences, promote reflective information behaviors, and reveal limits of current LLM-based search. We propose design implications emphasizing better social-knowledge understanding, personalized cue settings, and controllable interactions.

Quantum Visual Word Sense Disambiguation: Unraveling Ambiguities Through Quantum Inference Model

Visual word sense disambiguation focuses on polysemous words, where candidate images can be easily confused. Traditional methods use classical probability to calculate the likelihood of an image matching each gloss of the target word, summing these to form a posterior probability. However, due to the challenge of semantic uncertainty, glosses from different sources inevitably carry semantic biases, which can lead to biased disambiguation results. Inspired by quantum superposition in modeling uncertainty, this paper proposes a Quantum Inference Model for Unsupervised Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (Q-VWSD). It encodes multiple glosses of the target word into a superposition state to mitigate semantic biases. Then, the quantum circuit is executed, and the results are observed. By formalizing our method, we find that Q-VWSD is a quantum generalization of the method based on classical probability. Building on this, we further designed a heuristic version of Q-VWSD that can run more efficiently on classical computing. The experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art classical methods, particularly by effectively leveraging non-specialized glosses from large language models, which further enhances performance. Our approach showcases the potential of quantum machine learning in practical applications and provides a case for leveraging quantum modeling advantages on classical computers while quantum hardware remains immature.

BIOME-Bench: A Benchmark for Biomolecular Interaction Inference and Multi-Omics Pathway Mechanism Elucidation from Scientific Literature

Multi-omics studies often rely on pathway enrichment to interpret heterogeneous molecular changes, but pathway enrichment (PE)-based workflows inherit structural limitations of pathway resources, including curation lag, functional redundancy, and limited sensitivity to molecular states and interventions. Although recent work has explored using large language models (LLMs) to improve PE-based interpretation, the lack of a standardized benchmark for end-to-end multi-omics pathway mechanism elucidation has largely confined evaluation to small, manually curated datasets or ad hoc case studies, hindering reproducible progress. To address this issue, we introduce BIOME-Bench, constructed via a rigorous four-stage workflow, to evaluate two core capabilities of LLMs in multi-omics analysis: Biomolecular Interaction Inference and end-to-end Multi-Omics Pathway Mechanism Elucidation. We develop evaluation protocols for both tasks and conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple strong contemporary models. Experimental results demonstrate that existing models still exhibit substantial deficiencies in multi-omics analysis, struggling to reliably distinguish fine-grained biomolecular relation types and to generate faithful, robust pathway-level mechanistic explanations.

Large Emotional World Model

World Models serve as tools for understanding the current state of the world and predicting its future dynamics, with broad application potential across numerous fields. As a key component of world knowledge, emotion significantly influences human decision-making. While existing Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown preliminary capability in capturing world knowledge, they primarily focus on modeling physical-world regularities and lack systematic exploration of emotional factors. In this paper, we first demonstrate the importance of emotion in understanding the world by showing that removing emotionally relevant information degrades reasoning performance. Inspired by theory of mind, we further propose a Large Emotional World Model (LEWM). Specifically, we construct the Emotion-Why-How (EWH) dataset, which integrates emotion into causal relationships and enables reasoning about why actions occur and how emotions drive future world states. Based on this dataset, LEWM explicitly models emotional states alongside visual observations and actions, allowing the world model to predict both future states and emotional transitions. Experimental results show that LEWM more accurately predicts emotion-driven social behaviors while maintaining comparable performance to general world models on basic tasks.

Post-Training Quantization of OpenPangu Models for Efficient Deployment on Atlas A2

Huawei's openPangu-Embedded-1B and openPangu-Embedded-7B, variants of the openPangu large language model, integrate three distinct Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning paradigms, namely slow_think, auto_think, and no_think. While these CoT modes enhance reasoning capabilities, their generation of extended reasoning traces introduces substantial memory and latency overheads, posing challenges for practical deployment on Ascend NPUs. This paper addresses these computational constraints by leveraging low-bit quantization, which transforms FP16 computations into more efficient integer arithmetic. We introduce a unified low-bit inference framework, supporting INT8 (W8A8) and W4A8 quantization, specifically optimized for openPangu-Embedded models on the Atlas A2. Our comprehensive evaluation, conducted across all three CoT modes on code generation benchmarks (HumanEval and MBPP), demonstrates the efficacy of this approach. INT8 quantization consistently preserves over 90\% of the FP16 baseline accuracy and achieves a 1.5x prefill speedup on the Atlas A2. Furthermore, W4A8 quantization significantly reduces memory consumption, albeit with a moderate trade-off in accuracy. These findings collectively indicate that low-bit quantization effectively facilitates efficient CoT reasoning on Ascend NPUs, maintaining high model fidelity.

MiMo-Audio: Audio Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

Existing audio language models typically rely on task-specific fine-tuning to accomplish particular audio tasks. In contrast, humans are able to generalize to new audio tasks with only a few examples or simple instructions. GPT-3 has shown that scaling next-token prediction pretraining enables strong generalization capabilities in text, and we believe this paradigm is equally applicable to the audio domain. By scaling MiMo-Audio's pretraining data to over one hundred million of hours, we observe the emergence of few-shot learning capabilities across a diverse set of audio tasks. We develop a systematic evaluation of these capabilities and find that MiMo-Audio-7B-Base achieves SOTA performance on both speech intelligence and audio understanding benchmarks among open-source models. Beyond standard metrics, MiMo-Audio-7B-Base generalizes to tasks absent from its training data, such as voice conversion, style transfer, and speech editing. MiMo-Audio-7B-Base also demonstrates powerful speech continuation capabilities, capable of generating highly realistic talk shows, recitations, livestreaming and debates. At the post-training stage, we curate a diverse instruction-tuning corpus and introduce thinking mechanisms into both audio understanding and generation. MiMo-Audio-7B-Instruct achieves open-source SOTA on audio understanding benchmarks (MMSU, MMAU, MMAR, MMAU-Pro), spoken dialogue benchmarks (Big Bench Audio, MultiChallenge Audio) and instruct-TTS evaluations, approaching or surpassing closed-source models. Model checkpoints and full evaluation suite are available at https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Audio.

Knot Forcing: Taming Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models for Real-time Infinite Interactive Portrait Animation

Real-time portrait animation is essential for interactive applications such as virtual assistants and live avatars, requiring high visual fidelity, temporal coherence, ultra-low latency, and responsive control from dynamic inputs like reference images and driving signals. While diffusion-based models achieve strong quality, their non-causal nature hinders streaming deployment. Causal autoregressive video generation approaches enable efficient frame-by-frame generation but suffer from error accumulation, motion discontinuities at chunk boundaries, and degraded long-term consistency. In this work, we present a novel streaming framework named Knot Forcing for real-time portrait animation that addresses these challenges through three key designs: (1) a chunk-wise generation strategy with global identity preservation via cached KV states of the reference image and local temporal modeling using sliding window attention; (2) a temporal knot module that overlaps adjacent chunks and propagates spatio-temporal cues via image-to-video conditioning to smooth inter-chunk motion transitions; and (3) A "running ahead" mechanism that dynamically updates the reference frame's temporal coordinate during inference, keeping its semantic context ahead of the current rollout frame to support long-term coherence. Knot Forcing enables high-fidelity, temporally consistent, and interactive portrait animation over infinite sequences, achieving real-time performance with strong visual stability on consumer-grade GPUs.

SyncAnyone: Implicit Disentanglement via Progressive Self-Correction for Lip-Syncing in the wild

High-quality AI-powered video dubbing demands precise audio-lip synchronization, high-fidelity visual generation, and faithful preservation of identity and background. Most existing methods rely on a mask-based training strategy, where the mouth region is masked in talking-head videos, and the model learns to synthesize lip movements from corrupted inputs and target audios. While this facilitates lip-sync accuracy, it disrupts spatiotemporal context, impairing performance on dynamic facial motions and causing instability in facial structure and background consistency. To overcome this limitation, we propose SyncAnyone, a novel two-stage learning framework that achieves accurate motion modeling and high visual fidelity simultaneously. In Stage 1, we train a diffusion-based video transformer for masked mouth inpainting, leveraging its strong spatiotemporal modeling to generate accurate, audio-driven lip movements. However, due to input corruption, minor artifacts may arise in the surrounding facial regions and the background. In Stage 2, we develop a mask-free tuning pipeline to address mask-induced artifacts. Specifically, on the basis of the Stage 1 model, we develop a data generation pipeline that creates pseudo-paired training samples by synthesizing lip-synced videos from the source video and random sampled audio. We further tune the stage 2 model on this synthetic data, achieving precise lip editing and better background consistency. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in visual quality, temporal coherence, and identity preservation under in-the wild lip-syncing scenarios.

Towards Natural Language-Based Document Image Retrieval: New Dataset and Benchmark

Document image retrieval (DIR) aims to retrieve document images from a gallery according to a given query. Existing DIR methods are primarily based on image queries that retrieve documents within the same coarse semantic category, e.g., newspapers or receipts. However, these methods struggle to effectively retrieve document images in real-world scenarios where textual queries with fine-grained semantics are usually provided. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new Natural Language-based Document Image Retrieval (NL-DIR) benchmark with corresponding evaluation metrics. In this work, natural language descriptions serve as semantically rich queries for the DIR task. The NL-DIR dataset contains 41K authentic document images, each paired with five high-quality, fine-grained semantic queries generated and evaluated through large language models in conjunction with manual verification. We perform zero-shot and fine-tuning evaluations of existing mainstream contrastive vision-language models and OCR-free visual document understanding (VDU) models. A two-stage retrieval method is further investigated for performance improvement while achieving both time and space efficiency. We hope the proposed NL-DIR benchmark can bring new opportunities and facilitate research for the VDU community. Datasets and codes will be publicly available at huggingface.co/datasets/nianbing/NL-DIR.