From Knowledge to Action: Outcomes of the 2025 Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing how researchers in materials science and chemistry discover, organize, and act on scientific knowledge. This paper analyzes a broad set of community-developed LLM applications in an effort to identify emerging patterns in how these systems can be used across the scientific research lifecycle. We organize the projects into two complementary categories: Knowledge Infrastructure, systems that structure, retrieve, synthesize, and validate scientific information; and Action Systems, systems that execute, coordinate, or automate scientific work across computational and experimental environments. The submissions reveal a shift from single-purpose LLM tools toward integrated, multi-agent workflows that combine retrieval, reasoning, tool use, and domain-specific validation. Prominent themes include retrieval-augmented generation as grounding infrastructure, persistent structured knowledge representations, multimodal and multilingual scientific inputs, and early progress toward laboratory-integrated closed-loop systems. Together, these results suggest that LLMs are evolving from general-purpose assistants into composable infrastructure for scientific reasoning and action. This work provides a community snapshot of that transition and a practical taxonomy for understanding emerging LLM-enabled workflows in materials science and chemistry.

The Eleventh NTIRE 2026 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2026 challenge on efficient single-image super-resolution with a focus on the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects, such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while maintaining PSNR of around 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset, and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. The challenge had 95 registered participants, and 15 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art results for efficient single-image super-resolution.

Toward Multi-Satellite Cooperative Transmission: A Joint Framework for CSI Acquisition, Feedback, and Phase Synchronization

The stringent link budget, caused by long propagation distances and payload constraints, poses a fundamental bottleneck for single-satellite transmission. Although LEO mega-constellations make multi-satellite cooperative transmission (MSCT), such as distributed precoding (DP), increasingly feasible, its cooperative gains critically rely on stringent time-frequency-phase synchronization (TFP-Sync), which is difficult to maintain under rapid channel variation and feedback latency. To address this issue, this paper proposes a joint CSI acquisition, feedback, and phase-level synchronization (JCAFPS) framework for MSCT. Specifically, to enable reliable, overhead-efficient CSI acquisition, we design a beam-domain adjustable phase-shift tracking reference signal (TRS) transmission scheme, along with criteria for the TRS and CSI-feedback periods. Then, exploiting deterministic orbital motion and dominant LoS propagation, we establish a polynomial model for the temporal evolution of delay and Doppler shift, and derive an OFDM-based multi-satellite signal model under non-ideal synchronization. The analysis reveals that, unlike the single-satellite case, the composite multi-satellite channel exhibits nonlinear time-frequency-varying phase behavior, necessitating symbol- and subcarrier-wise phase precompensation for coherent transmission. Based on these results, we develop a practical closed-loop realization integrating single-TRS-based channel parameter estimation, multi-TRS-based channel prediction, predictive CSI feedback, and user-specific TFP precompensation. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves accurate CSI acquisition and precise TFP-Sync, enabling DP-based dual-satellite cooperative transmission to approach the theoretical 6 dB power gain over single-satellite transmission, while remaining robust under extended prediction durations and enlarged TRS periods.

OpenHospital: A Thing-in-itself Arena for Evolving and Benchmarking LLM-based Collective Intelligence

Large Language Model (LLM)-based Collective Intelligence (CI) presents a promising approach to overcoming the data wall and continuously boosting the capabilities of LLM agents. However, there is currently no dedicated arena for evolving and benchmarking LLM-based CI. To address this gap, we introduce OpenHospital, an interactive arena where physician agents can evolve CI through interactions with patient agents. This arena employs a data-in-agent-self paradigm that rapidly enhances agent capabilities and provides robust evaluation metrics for benchmarking both medical proficiency and system efficiency. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of OpenHospital in both fostering and quantifying CI.

CoIn3D: Revisiting Configuration-Invariant Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection

Multi-camera 3D object detection (MC3D) has attracted increasing attention with the growing deployment of multi-sensor physical agents, such as robots and autonomous vehicles. However, MC3D models still struggle to generalize to unseen platforms with new multi-camera configurations. Current solutions simply employ a meta-camera for unified representation but lack comprehensive consideration. In this paper, we revisit this issue and identify that the devil lies in spatial prior discrepancies across source and target configurations, including different intrinsics, extrinsics, and array layouts. To address this, we propose CoIn3D, a generalizable MC3D framework that enables strong transferability from source configurations to unseen target ones. CoIn3D explicitly incorporates all identified spatial priors into both feature embedding and image observation through spatial-aware feature modulation (SFM) and camera-aware data augmentation (CDA), respectively. SFM enriches feature space by integrating four spatial representations, such as focal length, ground depth, ground gradient, and Plücker coordinate. CDA improves observation diversity under various configurations via a training-free dynamic novel-view image synthesis scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoIn3D achieves strong cross-configuration performance on landmark datasets such as NuScenes, Waymo, and Lyft, under three dominant MC3D paradigms represented by BEVDepth, BEVFormer, and PETR.

Object-Scene-Camera Decomposition and Recomposition for Data-Efficient Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection (M3OD) is intrinsically ill-posed, hence training a high-performance deep learning based M3OD model requires a humongous amount of labeled data with complicated visual variation from diverse scenes, variety of objects and camera poses.However, we observe that, due to strong human bias, the three independent entities, i.e., object, scene, and camera pose, are always tightly entangled when an image is captured to construct training data. More specifically, specific 3D objects are always captured in particular scenes with fixed camera poses, and hence lacks necessary diversity. Such tight entanglement induces the challenging issues of insufficient utilization and overfitting to uniform training data. To mitigate this, we propose an online object-scene-camera decomposition and recomposition data manipulation scheme to more efficiently exploit the training data. We first fully decompose training images into textured 3D object point models and background scenes in an efficient computation and storage manner. We then continuously recompose new training images in each epoch by inserting the 3D objects into the freespace of the background scenes, and rendering them with perturbed camera poses from textured 3D point representation. In this way, the refreshed training data in all epochs can cover the full spectrum of independent object, scene, and camera pose combinations. This scheme can serve as a plug-and-play component to boost M3OD models, working flexibly with both fully and sparsely supervised settings. In the sparsely-supervised setting, objects closest to the ego-camera for all instances are sparsely annotated. We then can flexibly increase the annotated objects to control annotation cost. For validation, our method is widely applied to five representative M3OD models and evaluated on both the KITTI and the more complicated Waymo datasets.

Test-Time Learning of Causal Structure from Interventional Data

Supervised causal learning has shown promise in causal discovery, yet it often struggles with generalization across diverse interventional settings, particularly when intervention targets are unknown. To address this, we propose TICL (Test-time Interventional Causal Learning), a novel method that synergizes Test-Time Training with Joint Causal Inference. Specifically, we design a self-augmentation strategy to generate instance-specific training data at test time, effectively avoiding distribution shifts. Furthermore, by integrating joint causal inference, we developed a PC-inspired two-phase supervised learning scheme, which effectively leverages self-augmented training data while ensuring theoretical identifiability. Extensive experiments on bnlearn benchmarks demonstrate TICL's superiority in multiple aspects of causal discovery and intervention target detection.

Mind the Generative Details: Direct Localized Detail Preference Optimization for Video Diffusion Models

Aligning text-to-video diffusion models with human preferences is crucial for generating high-quality videos. Existing Direct Preference Otimization (DPO) methods rely on multi-sample ranking and task-specific critic models, which is inefficient and often yields ambiguous global supervision. To address these limitations, we propose LocalDPO, a novel post-training framework that constructs localized preference pairs from real videos and optimizes alignment at the spatio-temporal region level. We design an automated pipeline to efficiently collect preference pair data that generates preference pairs with a single inference per prompt, eliminating the need for external critic models or manual annotation. Specifically, we treat high-quality real videos as positive samples and generate corresponding negatives by locally corrupting them with random spatio-temporal masks and restoring only the masked regions using the frozen base model. During training, we introduce a region-aware DPO loss that restricts preference learning to corrupted areas for rapid convergence. Experiments on Wan2.1 and CogVideoX demonstrate that LocalDPO consistently improves video fidelity, temporal coherence and human preference scores over other post-training approaches, establishing a more efficient and fine-grained paradigm for video generator alignment.

Multi-Satellite Multi-Stream Beamspace Massive MIMO Transmission

This paper studies multi-satellite multi-stream (MSMS) beamspace transmission, where multiple satellites cooperate to form a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system and jointly deliver multiple data streams to multi-antenna user terminals (UTs), and beamspace transmission combines earth-moving beamforming with beam-domain precoding. For the first time, we formulate the signal model for MSMS beamspace MIMO transmission. Under synchronization errors, multi-antenna UTs enable the distributed MIMO channel to exhibit higher rank, supporting multiple data streams. Beamspace MIMO retains conventional codebook based beamforming while providing the performance gains of precoding. Based on the signal model, we propose statistical channel state information (sCSI)-based optimization of satellite clustering, beam selection, and transmit precoding, using a sum-rate upper-bound approximation. With given satellite clustering and beam selection, we cast precoder design as an equivalent covariance decomposition-based weighted minimum mean square error (CDWMMSE) problem. To obtain tractable algorithms, we develop a closed-form covariance decomposition required by CDWMMSE and derive an iterative MSMS beam-domain precoder under sCSI. Following this, we further propose several heuristic closed-form precoders to avoid iterative cost. For satellite clustering, we enhance a competition-based algorithm by introducing a mechanism to regulate the number of satellites serving certain UT. Furthermore, we design a two-stage low-complexity beam selection algorithm focused on enhancing the effective channel power. Simulations under practical configurations validate the proposed methods across the number of data streams, receive antennas, serving satellites, and active beams, and show that beamspace transmission approaches conventional MIMO performance at lower complexity.

Generalization of RLVR Using Causal Reasoning as a Testbed

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, the conditions under which RLVR yields robust generalization remain poorly understood. This paper provides an empirical study of RLVR generalization in the setting of probabilistic inference over causal graphical models. This setting offers two natural axes along which to examine generalization: (i) the level of the probabilistic query -- associational, interventional, or counterfactual -- and (ii) the structural complexity of the query, measured by the size of its relevant subgraph. We construct datasets of causal graphs and queries spanning these difficulty axes and fine-tune Qwen-2.5-Instruct models using RLVR or supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We vary both the model scale (3B-32B) and the query level included in training. We find that RLVR yields stronger within-level and across-level generalization than SFT, but only for specific combinations of model size and training query level. Further analysis shows that RLVR's effectiveness depends on the model's initial reasoning competence. With sufficient initial competence, RLVR improves an LLM's marginalization strategy and reduces errors in intermediate probability calculations, producing substantial accuracy gains, particularly on more complex queries. These findings show that RLVR can improve specific causal reasoning subskills, with its benefits emerging only when the model has sufficient initial competence.