Resolving the bias-precision paradox with stochastic causal representation learning for personalized medicine

Estimating individualized treatment effects from longitudinal observational data is central to data-driven medicine, yet existing methods face a fundamental limitation: reducing confounding bias often suppresses clinically informative heterogeneity, degrading patient-specific predictions. Here, we identify this tension as a bias-precision paradox in causal representation learning and introduce sampling-based maximum mean discrepancy (sMMD), a stochastic alignment strategy that replaces global adversarial balancing with subset-level matching. We instantiate this approach in a framework for counterfactual outcome prediction with attribution-grounded interpretability. Across two large-scale ICU cohorts (n = 27,783), our framework improves accuracy under distribution shift, reducing error by up to 11.5% and substantially increasing recall in high-risk tasks. Mechanistic analyses show that sMMD selectively preserves clinically decisive variables. In human-AI evaluation, our method outperforms clinicians-in-training and large language models, and improves clinician accuracy by 14.7% while reducing decision time, enabling interpretable, real-time clinical decision support.

Event-based SLAM Benchmark for High-Speed Maneuvers

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors with pixels that independently and asynchronously respond to brightness changes at microsecond resolution, offering the potential to handle visual tasks in high-speed maneuvering scenarios. Existing event-based approaches, although successful in mitigating motion blur caused by high-speed maneuvers, suffer from many limitations. Some of them highlight a success of pose tracking for a fronto-parallel fast shaking camera closed to the structure, while others assume pure (optionally aggressive) three-degree-of-freedom rotations. The former requires persistent local map visibility within the field of view (FOV), whereas the latter fails to generalize to six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) motions where both linear and angular velocities may be large. Consequently, current successes do not fully demonstrate that event-based state estimation under arbitrary aggressive maneuvers is a fully solved problem. To quantitatively assess the extent to which the potential of event cameras has been unlocked, we conduct a thorough analysis of state-of-the-art (SOTA) event-based visual odometry (VO)/visual-inertial odometry (VIO) methods and report shortcomings in current public datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmarking framework for event-based state estimation, called EvSLAM, characterized by sufficient variation in data collection platforms, diverse extreme lighting scenarios, and a wide scope of challenging motion patterns under a clear and rigorous definition of high-speed maneuvers for mobile robots, along with a novel evaluation metric designed to fairly assess the operational limits of event-based solutions. This framework benchmarks state-of-the-art methods, yielding insights into optimal architectures and persistent challenges.

Towards Privacy-Preserving LLM Inference via Collaborative Obfuscation (Technical Report)

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has driven the widespread adoption of cloud-based LLM inference services, while also bringing prominent privacy risks associated with the transmission and processing of private data in remote inference. For privacy-preserving LLM inference technologies to be practically applied in industrial scenarios, three core requirements must be satisfied simultaneously: (1) Accuracy and efficiency losses should be minimized to mitigate degradation in service experience. (2) The inference process can be run on large-scale clusters consist of heterogeneous legacy xPUs. (3) Compatibility with existing LLM infrastructures should be ensured to reuse their engineering optimizations. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing privacy-preserving LLM inference methods satisfy all the above constraints while delivering meaningful privacy guarantees. In this paper, we propose AloePri, the first privacy-preserving LLM inference method for industrial applications. AloePri protects both the input and output data by covariant obfuscation, which jointly transforms data and model parameters to achieve better accuracy and privacy. We carefully design the transformation for each model component to ensure inference accuracy and data privacy while keeping full compatibility with existing infrastructures of Language Model as a Service. AloePri has been integrated into an industrial system for the evaluation of mainstream LLMs. The evaluation on Deepseek-V3.1-Terminus model (671B parameters) demonstrates that AloePri causes accuracy loss of 0.0%~3.5% and exhibits efficiency equivalent to that of plaintext inference. Meanwhile, AloePri successfully resists state-of-the-art attacks, with less than 5\% of tokens recovered. To the best of our knowledge, AloePri is the first method to exhibit practical applicability to large-scale models in real-world systems.

Neural Implicit Action Fields: From Discrete Waypoints to Continuous Functions for Vision-Language-Action Models

Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, the prevailing paradigm of predicting discrete waypoints remains fundamentally misaligned with the intrinsic continuity of physical motion. This discretization imposes rigid sampling rates, lacks high-order differentiability, and introduces quantization artifacts that hinder precise, compliant interaction. We propose Neural Implicit Action Fields (NIAF), a paradigm shift that reformulates action prediction from discrete waypoints to continuous action function regression. By utilizing an MLLM as a hierarchical spectral modulator over a learnable motion prior, NIAF synthesizes infinite-resolution trajectories as continuous-time manifolds. This formulation enables analytical differentiability, allowing for explicit supervision of velocity, acceleration, and jerk to ensure mathematical consistency and physical plausibility. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on CALVIN and LIBERO benchmarks across diverse backbones. Furthermore, real-world experiments demonstrate that NIAF enables stable impedance control, bridging the gap between high-level semantic understanding and low-level dynamic execution.

Real-time Motion Segmentation with Event-based Normal Flow

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors with pixels that independently and asynchronously respond to brightness changes at microsecond resolution, offering the potential to handle visual tasks in challenging scenarios. However, due to the sparse information content in individual events, directly processing the raw event data to solve vision tasks is highly inefficient, which severely limits the applicability of state-of-the-art methods in real-time tasks, such as motion segmentation, a fundamental task for dynamic scene understanding. Incorporating normal flow as an intermediate representation to compress motion information from event clusters within a localized region provides a more effective solution. In this work, we propose a normal flow-based motion segmentation framework for event-based vision. Leveraging the dense normal flow directly learned from event neighborhoods as input, we formulate the motion segmentation task as an energy minimization problem solved via graph cuts, and optimize it iteratively with normal flow clustering and motion model fitting. By using a normal flow-based motion model initialization and fitting method, the proposed system is able to efficiently estimate the motion models of independently moving objects with only a limited number of candidate models, which significantly reduces the computational complexity and ensures real-time performance, achieving nearly a 800x speedup in comparison to the open-source state-of-the-art method. Extensive evaluations on multiple public datasets fully demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our framework.

DART: Diffusion-Inspired Speculative Decoding for Fast LLM Inference

Speculative decoding is an effective and lossless approach for accelerating LLM inference. However, existing widely adopted model-based draft designs, such as EAGLE3, improve accuracy at the cost of multi-step autoregressive inference, resulting in high drafting latency and ultimately rendering the drafting stage itself a performance bottleneck. Inspired by diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs), we propose DART, which leverages parallel generation to reduce drafting latency. DART predicts logits for multiple future masked positions in parallel within a single forward pass based on hidden states of the target model, thereby eliminating autoregressive rollouts in the draft model while preserving a lightweight design. Based on these parallel logit predictions, we further introduce an efficient tree pruning algorithm that constructs high-quality draft token trees with N-gram-enforced semantic continuity. DART substantially reduces draft-stage overhead while preserving high draft accuracy, leading to significantly improved end-to-end decoding speed. Experimental results demonstrate that DART achieves a 2.03x--3.44x wall-clock time speedup across multiple datasets, surpassing EAGLE3 by 30% on average and offering a practical speculative decoding framework. Code is released at https://github.com/fvliang/DART.

A Systematic Study of Code Obfuscation Against LLM-based Vulnerability Detection

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for code vulnerability detection, their reliability and robustness across diverse vulnerability types have become a pressing concern. In traditional adversarial settings, code obfuscation has long been used as a general strategy to bypass auditing tools, preserving exploitability without tampering with the tools themselves. Numerous efforts have explored obfuscation methods and tools, yet their capabilities differ in terms of supported techniques, granularity, and programming languages, making it difficult to systematically assess their impact on LLM-based vulnerability detection. To address this gap, we provide a structured systematization of obfuscation techniques and evaluate them under a unified framework. Specifically, we categorize existing obfuscation methods into three major classes (layout, data flow, and control flow) covering 11 subcategories and 19 concrete techniques. We implement these techniques across four programming languages (Solidity, C, C++, and Python) using a consistent LLM-driven approach, and evaluate their effects on 15 LLMs spanning four model families (DeepSeek, OpenAI, Qwen, and LLaMA), as well as on two coding agents (GitHub Copilot and Codex). Our findings reveal both positive and negative impacts of code obfuscation on LLM-based vulnerability detection, highlighting conditions under which obfuscation leads to performance improvements or degradations. We further analyze these outcomes with respect to vulnerability characteristics, code properties, and model attributes. Finally, we outline several open problems and propose future directions to enhance the robustness of LLMs for real-world vulnerability detection.

The LLM Already Knows: Estimating LLM-Perceived Question Difficulty via Hidden Representations

Estimating the difficulty of input questions as perceived by large language models (LLMs) is essential for accurate performance evaluation and adaptive inference. Existing methods typically rely on repeated response sampling, auxiliary models, or fine-tuning the target model itself, which may incur substantial computational costs or compromise generality. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for difficulty estimation that leverages only the hidden representations produced by the target LLM. We model the token-level generation process as a Markov chain and define a value function to estimate the expected output quality given any hidden state. This allows for efficient and accurate difficulty estimation based solely on the initial hidden state, without generating any output tokens. Extensive experiments across both textual and multimodal tasks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines in difficulty estimation. Moreover, we apply our difficulty estimates to guide adaptive reasoning strategies, including Self-Consistency, Best-of-N, and Self-Refine, achieving higher inference efficiency with fewer generated tokens.

Deep Visual Odometry for Stereo Event Cameras

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors with pixels that independently and asynchronously respond to brightness changes at microsecond resolution, offering the potential to handle state estimation tasks involving motion blur and high dynamic range (HDR) illumination conditions. However, the versatility of event-based visual odometry (VO) relying on handcrafted data association (either direct or indirect methods) is still unreliable, especially in field robot applications under low-light HDR conditions, where the dynamic range can be enormous and the signal-to-noise ratio is spatially-and-temporally varying. Leveraging deep neural networks offers new possibilities for overcoming these challenges. In this paper, we propose a learning-based stereo event visual odometry. Building upon Deep Event Visual Odometry (DEVO), our system (called Stereo-DEVO) introduces a novel and efficient static-stereo association strategy for sparse depth estimation with almost no additional computational burden. By integrating it into a tightly coupled bundle adjustment (BA) optimization scheme, and benefiting from the recurrent network's ability to perform accurate optical flow estimation through voxel-based event representations to establish reliable patch associations, our system achieves high-precision pose estimation in metric scale. In contrast to the offline performance of DEVO, our system can process event data of \zs{Video Graphics Array} (VGA) resolution in real time. Extensive evaluations on multiple public real-world datasets and self-collected data justify our system's versatility, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art event-based VO methods. More importantly, our system achieves stable pose estimation even in large-scale nighttime HDR scenarios.

On Evaluating the Poisoning Robustness of Federated Learning under Local Differential Privacy

Federated learning (FL) combined with local differential privacy (LDP) enables privacy-preserving model training across decentralized data sources. However, the decentralized data-management paradigm leaves LDPFL vulnerable to participants with malicious intent. The robustness of LDPFL protocols, particularly against model poisoning attacks (MPA), where adversaries inject malicious updates to disrupt global model convergence, remains insufficiently studied. In this paper, we propose a novel and extensible model poisoning attack framework tailored for LDPFL settings. Our approach is driven by the objective of maximizing the global training loss while adhering to local privacy constraints. To counter robust aggregation mechanisms such as Multi-Krum and trimmed mean, we develop adaptive attacks that embed carefully crafted constraints into a reverse training process, enabling evasion of these defenses. We evaluate our framework across three representative LDPFL protocols, three benchmark datasets, and two types of deep neural networks. Additionally, we investigate the influence of data heterogeneity and privacy budgets on attack effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that our adaptive attacks can significantly degrade the performance of the global model, revealing critical vulnerabilities and highlighting the need for more robust LDPFL defense strategies against MPA. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiJW/LDPFL-Attack