LeapTalk: Breaking the Latency-Quality Trade-off in Talking Head Generation

Long-form and real-time talking-head generation remains challenging due to a latency-quality trade-off: inefficient multi-step diffusion prohibits streaming generation, whereas real-time autoregressive approaches suffer from error accumulation and identity drift. To address this drawback, we propose LeapTalk, a novel framework that achieves stable and real-time talking-head generation with a single forward step, scaling to arbitrarily long videos. At the heart of our approach lies a single-step bridge distillation scheme. On the one hand, departing from the conventional noise-to-data paradigm, we introduce a data-to-data transport formulation based on a Brownian bridge. Anchored by a persistent reference, this strategy effectively mitigates identity drift and enhances long-term temporal stability. On the other hand, to enable smooth knowledge transfer from a pre-trained diffusion teacher to the student bridge model, we explore a heterogeneous distillation framework with an SNR-aligned time transformation $Φ(τ)$, which bridges the functional discrepancy between the two models. Moreover, we propose an audio-driven classifier-free guidance mechanism to maintain fine-grained lip synchronization under extreme step reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high-fidelity and temporally consistent video generation with only 1 step at up to 200 FPS, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both efficiency and stability. Project Page: https://zhangrongxiang.github.io/leaptalk-page/

ManuSearch: Democratizing Deep Search in Large Language Models with a Transparent and Open Multi-Agent Framework

Recent advances in web-augmented large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong performance in complex reasoning tasks, yet these capabilities are mostly locked in proprietary systems with opaque architectures. In this work, we propose \textbf{ManuSearch}, a transparent and modular multi-agent framework designed to democratize deep search for LLMs. ManuSearch decomposes the search and reasoning process into three collaborative agents: (1) a solution planning agent that iteratively formulates sub-queries, (2) an Internet search agent that retrieves relevant documents via real-time web search, and (3) a structured webpage reading agent that extracts key evidence from raw web content. To rigorously evaluate deep reasoning abilities, we introduce \textbf{ORION}, a challenging benchmark focused on open-web reasoning over long-tail entities, covering both English and Chinese. Experimental results show that ManuSearch substantially outperforms prior open-source baselines and even surpasses leading closed-source systems. Our work paves the way for reproducible, extensible research in open deep search systems. We release the data and code in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ManuSearch

AdaMHF: Adaptive Multimodal Hierarchical Fusion for Survival Prediction

The integration of pathologic images and genomic data for survival analysis has gained increasing attention with advances in multimodal learning. However, current methods often ignore biological characteristics, such as heterogeneity and sparsity, both within and across modalities, ultimately limiting their adaptability to clinical practice. To address these challenges, we propose AdaMHF: Adaptive Multimodal Hierarchical Fusion, a framework designed for efficient, comprehensive, and tailored feature extraction and fusion. AdaMHF is specifically adapted to the uniqueness of medical data, enabling accurate predictions with minimal resource consumption, even under challenging scenarios with missing modalities. Initially, AdaMHF employs an experts expansion and residual structure to activate specialized experts for extracting heterogeneous and sparse features. Extracted tokens undergo refinement via selection and aggregation, reducing the weight of non-dominant features while preserving comprehensive information. Subsequently, the encoded features are hierarchically fused, allowing multi-grained interactions across modalities to be captured. Furthermore, we introduce a survival prediction benchmark designed to resolve scenarios with missing modalities, mirroring real-world clinical conditions. Extensive experiments on TCGA datasets demonstrate that AdaMHF surpasses current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, showcasing exceptional performance in both complete and incomplete modality settings.

PatchScaler: An Efficient Patch-independent Diffusion Model for Super-Resolution

Diffusion models significantly improve the quality of super-resolved images with their impressive content generation capabilities. However, the huge computational costs limit the applications of these methods.Recent efforts have explored reasonable inference acceleration to reduce the number of sampling steps, but the computational cost remains high as each step is performed on the entire image.This paper introduces PatchScaler, a patch-independent diffusion-based single image super-resolution (SR) method, designed to enhance the efficiency of the inference process.The proposed method is motivated by the observation that not all the image patches within an image need the same sampling steps for reconstructing high-resolution images.Based on this observation, we thus develop a Patch-adaptive Group Sampling (PGS) to divide feature patches into different groups according to the patch-level reconstruction difficulty and dynamically assign an appropriate sampling configuration for each group so that the inference speed can be better accelerated.In addition, to improve the denoising ability at each step of the sampling, we develop a texture prompt to guide the estimations of the diffusion model by retrieving high-quality texture priors from a patch-independent reference texture memory.Experiments show that our PatchScaler achieves favorable performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations with fast inference speed.Our code and model are available at \url{https://github.com/yongliuy/PatchScaler}.