Training Prompt Matters: State-Adaptive Optimization for Robust Fine-Tuning

While prompt engineering is instrumental in maximizing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference, the role of prompts during training remains critically underexplored. Prevailing fine-tuning paradigms typically treat training prompts as mere surface forms, assuming that semantically equivalent instructions yield identical learning outcomes. However, we reveal that this equivalence is deceptive: while paraphrased prompts often lead to comparable in-task performance, they induce drastically different cross-task impacts regarding catastrophic forgetting and generalization. Crucially, these impacts are positively correlated across tasks, indicating the existence of superior prompts that consistently yield better performance. Furthermore, we discover that these superior prompts can be robustly identified by task loss prior to learning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce State-Adaptive Prompt Optimization (SAPO), a lightweight yet effective training strategy that shifts task formulation from a static input to a dynamic, state-adaptive variable. Comprehensive experiments on diverse benchmarks confirm its effectiveness, which significantly mitigates forgetting while improving generalization, achieving substantial performance gains over state-of-the-art methods. These results provide insights into how training prompts shape learning dynamics and offer a practical recipe for robust fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Eric8932/SAPO.

PEARL: Training Socratic Tutors with Pedagogically Aligned Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as educational tutors, yet effective tutoring requires more than solving problems: it must provide progressive Socratic guidance and balance multiple pedagogical objectives across multi-turn interactions. However, training such tutors remains challenging due to limited-fidelity and weakly controllable student simulation, under-specified pedagogical reward modeling, and unstable multi-objective optimization. To overcome these limitations, we propose PEARL, a pedagogically aligned reinforcement learning framework for training Socratic tutoring agents, consisting of three key components. First, we introduce a controllable student simulator that decouples latent cognitive states from response generation to model diverse abilities and misconceptions. Second, we develop a generative reward model that jointly evaluates pedagogical quality and objective correctness for policy optimization. Finally, we propose a stable multi-objective RL scheme that discretizes rewards within each dimension and aggregates normalized advantages across dimensions, preventing high-variance objectives from dominating updates. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that PEARL achieves the best performance among open-source models and remains competitive with leading proprietary LLMs, despite using only a 30B policy model.

Exploring Accurate and Transparent Domain Adaptation in Predictive Healthcare via Concept-Grounded Orthogonal Inference

Deep learning models for clinical event prediction on electronic health records (EHR) often suffer performance degradation when deployed under different data distributions. While domain adaptation (DA) methods can mitigate such shifts, its "black-box" nature prevents widespread adoption in clinical practice where transparency is essential for trust and safety. We propose ExtraCare to decompose patient representations into invariant and covariant components. By supervising these two components and enforcing their orthogonality during training, our model preserves label information while exposing domain-specific variation at the same time for more accurate predictions than most feature alignment models. More importantly, it offers human-understandable explanations by mapping sparse latent dimensions to medical concepts and quantifying their contributions via targeted ablations. ExtraCare is evaluated on two real-world EHR datasets across multiple domain partition settings, demonstrating superior performance along with enhanced transparency, as evidenced by its accurate predictions and explanations from extensive case studies.

Reinforced Curriculum Pre-Alignment for Domain-Adaptive VLMs

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable general-purpose capabilities but often fall short in specialized domains such as medical imaging or geometric problem-solving. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) can enhance performance within a target domain, but it typically causes catastrophic forgetting, limiting its generalization. The central challenge, therefore, is to adapt VLMs to new domains while preserving their general-purpose capabilities. Continual pretraining is effective for expanding knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs), but it is less feasible for VLMs due to prohibitive computational costs and the unavailability of pretraining data for most open-source models. This necessitates efficient post-training adaptation methods. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) have shown promise in preserving general abilities, yet they often fail in domain adaptation scenarios where the model initially lacks sufficient domain knowledge, leading to optimization collapse. To bridge this gap, we propose Reinforced Curriculum Pre-Alignment (RCPA), a novel post-training paradigm that introduces a curriculum-aware progressive modulation mechanism. In the early phase, RCPA applies partial output constraints to safely expose the model to new domain concepts. As the model's domain familiarity increases, training gradually transitions to full generation optimization, refining responses and aligning them with domain-specific preferences. This staged adaptation balances domain knowledge acquisition with the preservation of general multimodal capabilities. Extensive experiments across specialized domains and general benchmarks validate the effectiveness of RCPA, establishing a practical pathway toward building high-performing and domain-adaptive VLMs.

From Structure to Detail: Hierarchical Distillation for Efficient Diffusion Model

The inference latency of diffusion models remains a critical barrier to their real-time application. While trajectory-based and distribution-based step distillation methods offer solutions, they present a fundamental trade-off. Trajectory-based methods preserve global structure but act as a "lossy compressor", sacrificing high-frequency details. Conversely, distribution-based methods can achieve higher fidelity but often suffer from mode collapse and unstable training. This paper recasts them from independent paradigms into synergistic components within our novel Hierarchical Distillation (HD) framework. We leverage trajectory distillation not as a final generator, but to establish a structural ``sketch", providing a near-optimal initialization for the subsequent distribution-based refinement stage. This strategy yields an ideal initial distribution that enhances the ceiling of overall performance. To further improve quality, we introduce and refine the adversarial training process. We find standard discriminator structures are ineffective at refining an already high-quality generator. To overcome this, we introduce the Adaptive Weighted Discriminator (AWD), tailored for the HD pipeline. By dynamically allocating token weights, AWD focuses on local imperfections, enabling efficient detail refinement. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks. On ImageNet $256\times256$, our single-step model achieves an FID of 2.26, rivaling its 250-step teacher. It also achieves promising results on the high-resolution text-to-image MJHQ benchmark, proving its generalizability. Our method establishes a robust new paradigm for high-fidelity, single-step diffusion models.

Adaptive Graph Learning with Transformer for Multi-Reservoir Inflow Prediction

Reservoir inflow prediction is crucial for water resource management, yet existing approaches mainly focus on single-reservoir models that ignore spatial dependencies among interconnected reservoirs. We introduce AdaTrip as an adaptive, time-varying graph learning framework for multi-reservoir inflow forecasting. AdaTrip constructs dynamic graphs where reservoirs are nodes with directed edges reflecting hydrological connections, employing attention mechanisms to automatically identify crucial spatial and temporal dependencies. Evaluation on thirty reservoirs in the Upper Colorado River Basin demonstrates superiority over existing baselines, with improved performance for reservoirs with limited records through parameter sharing. Additionally, AdaTrip provides interpretable attention maps at edge and time-step levels, offering insights into hydrological controls to support operational decision-making. Our code is available at https://github.com/humphreyhuu/AdaTrip.

UdonCare: Hierarchy Pruning for Unseen Domain Discovery in Predictive Healthcare

Domain generalization has become a critical challenge in clinical prediction, where patient cohorts often exhibit shifting data distributions that degrade model performance. Typical domain generalization approaches struggle in real-world healthcare settings for two main reasons: (1) patient-specific domain labels are typically unavailable, making domain discovery especially difficult; (2) purely data-driven approaches overlook key clinical insights, leading to a gap in medical knowledge integration. To address these problems, we leverage hierarchical medical ontologies like the ICD-9-CM hierarchy to group diseases into higher-level categories and discover more flexible latent domains. In this paper, we introduce UdonCare, a hierarchy-guided framework that iteratively prunes fine-grained domains, encodes these refined domains, and applies a Siamese-type inference mechanism to separate domain-related signals from patient-level features. Experimental results on clinical datasets (MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV) show that the proposed model achieves higher performance compared to other domain generalization baselines when substantial domain gaps presents, highlighting the untapped potential of medical knowledge for enhancing domain generalization in practical healthcare applications.

No Black Boxes: Interpretable and Interactable Predictive Healthcare with Knowledge-Enhanced Agentic Causal Discovery

Deep learning models trained on extensive Electronic Health Records (EHR) data have achieved high accuracy in diagnosis prediction, offering the potential to assist clinicians in decision-making and treatment planning. However, these models lack two crucial features that clinicians highly value: interpretability and interactivity. The ``black-box'' nature of these models makes it difficult for clinicians to understand the reasoning behind predictions, limiting their ability to make informed decisions. Additionally, the absence of interactive mechanisms prevents clinicians from incorporating their own knowledge and experience into the decision-making process. To address these limitations, we propose II-KEA, a knowledge-enhanced agent-driven causal discovery framework that integrates personalized knowledge databases and agentic LLMs. II-KEA enhances interpretability through explicit reasoning and causal analysis, while also improving interactivity by allowing clinicians to inject their knowledge and experience through customized knowledge bases and prompts. II-KEA is evaluated on both MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, demonstrating superior performance along with enhanced interpretability and interactivity, as evidenced by its strong results from extensive case studies.

Accelerating Autoregressive Speech Synthesis Inference With Speech Speculative Decoding

Modern autoregressive speech synthesis models leveraging language models have demonstrated remarkable performance. However, the sequential nature of next token prediction in these models leads to significant latency, hindering their deployment in scenarios where inference speed is critical. In this work, we propose Speech Speculative Decoding (SSD), a novel framework for autoregressive speech synthesis acceleration. Specifically, our method employs a lightweight draft model to generate candidate token sequences, which are subsequently verified in parallel by the target model using the proposed SSD framework. Experimental results demonstrate that SSD achieves a significant speedup of 1.4x compared with conventional autoregressive decoding, while maintaining high fidelity and naturalness. Subjective evaluations further validate the effectiveness of SSD in preserving the perceptual quality of the target model while accelerating inference.

Shadow-FT: Tuning Instruct via Base

Large language models (LLMs) consistently benefit from further fine-tuning on various tasks. However, we observe that directly tuning the INSTRUCT (i.e., instruction tuned) models often leads to marginal improvements and even performance degeneration. Notably, paired BASE models, the foundation for these INSTRUCT variants, contain highly similar weight values (i.e., less than 2% on average for Llama 3.1 8B). Therefore, we propose a novel Shadow-FT framework to tune the INSTRUCT models by leveraging the corresponding BASE models. The key insight is to fine-tune the BASE model, and then directly graft the learned weight updates to the INSTRUCT model. Our proposed Shadow-FT introduces no additional parameters, is easy to implement, and significantly improves performance. We conduct extensive experiments on tuning mainstream LLMs, such as Qwen 3 and Llama 3 series, and evaluate them across 19 benchmarks covering coding, reasoning, and mathematical tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that Shadow-FT consistently outperforms conventional full-parameter and parameter-efficient tuning approaches. Further analyses indicate that Shadow-FT can be applied to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and combined with direct preference optimization (DPO). Codes and weights are available at \href{https://github.com/wutaiqiang/Shadow-FT}{Github}.