IB-GRPO: Aligning LLM-based Learning Path Recommendation with Educational Objectives via Indicator-Based Group Relative Policy Optimization

Learning Path Recommendation (LPR) aims to generate personalized sequences of learning items that maximize long-term learning effect while respecting pedagogical principles and operational constraints. Although large language models (LLMs) offer rich semantic understanding for free-form recommendation, applying them to long-horizon LPR is challenging due to (i) misalignment with pedagogical objectives such as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) under sparse, delayed feedback, (ii) scarce and costly expert demonstrations, and (iii) multi-objective interactions among learning effect, difficulty scheduling, length controllability, and trajectory diversity. To address these issues, we propose IB-GRPO (Indicator-Based Group Relative Policy Optimization), an indicator-guided alignment approach for LLM-based LPR. To mitigate data scarcity, we construct hybrid expert demonstrations via Genetic Algorithm search and teacher RL agents and warm-start the LLM with supervised fine-tuning. Building on this warm-start, we design a within-session ZPD alignment score for difficulty scheduling. IB-GRPO then uses the $I_{ε+}$ dominance indicator to compute group-relative advantages over multiple objectives, avoiding manual scalarization and improving Pareto trade-offs. Experiments on ASSIST09 and Junyi using the KES simulator with a Qwen2.5-7B backbone show consistent improvements over representative RL and LLM baselines.

WeDefense: A Toolkit to Defend Against Fake Audio

The advances in generative AI have enabled the creation of synthetic audio which is perceptually indistinguishable from real, genuine audio. Although this stellar progress enables many positive applications, it also raises risks of misuse, such as for impersonation, disinformation and fraud. Despite a growing number of open-source fake audio detection codes released through numerous challenges and initiatives, most are tailored to specific competitions, datasets or models. A standardized and unified toolkit that supports the fair benchmarking and comparison of competing solutions with not just common databases, protocols, metrics, but also a shared codebase, is missing. To address this, we propose WeDefense, the first open-source toolkit to support both fake audio detection and localization. Beyond model training, WeDefense emphasizes critical yet often overlooked components: flexible input and augmentation, calibration, score fusion, standardized evaluation metrics, and analysis tools for deeper understanding and interpretation. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/zlin0/wedefense with interactive demos for fake audio detection and localization.

The ICASSP 2026 Automatic Song Aesthetics Evaluation Challenge

This paper summarizes the ICASSP 2026 Automatic Song Aesthetics Evaluation (ASAE) Challenge, which focuses on predicting the subjective aesthetic scores of AI-generated songs. The challenge consists of two tracks: Track 1 targets the prediction of the overall musicality score, while Track 2 focuses on predicting five fine-grained aesthetic scores. The challenge attracted strong interest from the research community and received numerous submissions from both academia and industry. Top-performing systems significantly surpassed the official baseline, demonstrating substantial progress in aligning objective metrics with human aesthetic preferences. The outcomes establish a standardized benchmark and advance human-aligned evaluation methodologies for modern music generation systems.

VLM-CAD: VLM-Optimized Collaborative Agent Design Workflow for Analog Circuit Sizing

Analog mixed-signal circuit sizing involves complex trade-offs within high-dimensional design spaces. Existing automatic analog circuit sizing approaches often underutilize circuit schematics and lack the explainability required for industry adoption. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Vision Language Model-optimized collaborative agent design workflow (VLM-CAD), which analyzes circuits, optimizes DC operating points, performs inference-based sizing and executes external sizing optimization. We integrate Image2Net to annotate circuit schematics and generate a structured JSON description for precise interpretation by Vision Language Models. Furthermore, we propose an Explainable Trust Region Bayesian Optimization method (ExTuRBO) that employs collaborative warm-starting from agent-generated seeds and offers dual-granularity sensitivity analysis for external sizing optimization, supporting a comprehensive final design report. Experiment results on amplifier sizing tasks using 180nm, 90nm, and 45nm Predictive Technology Models demonstrate that VLM-CAD effectively balances power and performance, achieving a 100% success rate in optimizing an amplifier with a complementary input and a class-AB output stage, while maintaining total runtime under 43 minutes across all experiments.

NextFlow: Unified Sequential Modeling Activates Multimodal Understanding and Generation

We present NextFlow, a unified decoder-only autoregressive transformer trained on 6 trillion interleaved text-image discrete tokens. By leveraging a unified vision representation within a unified autoregressive architecture, NextFlow natively activates multimodal understanding and generation capabilities, unlocking abilities of image editing, interleaved content and video generation. Motivated by the distinct nature of modalities - where text is strictly sequential and images are inherently hierarchical - we retain next-token prediction for text but adopt next-scale prediction for visual generation. This departs from traditional raster-scan methods, enabling the generation of 1024x1024 images in just 5 seconds - orders of magnitude faster than comparable AR models. We address the instabilities of multi-scale generation through a robust training recipe. Furthermore, we introduce a prefix-tuning strategy for reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate that NextFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance among unified models and rivals specialized diffusion baselines in visual quality.

Physically-Grounded Manifold Projection Model for Generalizable Metal Artifact Reduction in Dental CBCT

Metal artifacts in Dental CBCT severely obscure anatomical structures, hindering diagnosis. Current deep learning for Metal Artifact Reduction (MAR) faces limitations: supervised methods suffer from spectral blurring due to "regression-to-the-mean", while unsupervised ones risk structural hallucinations. Denoising Diffusion Models (DDPMs) offer realism but rely on slow, stochastic iterative sampling, unsuitable for clinical use. To resolve this, we propose the Physically-Grounded Manifold Projection (PGMP) framework. First, our Anatomically-Adaptive Physics Simulation (AAPS) pipeline synthesizes high-fidelity training pairs via Monte Carlo spectral modeling and patient-specific digital twins, bridging the synthetic-to-real gap. Second, our DMP-Former adapts the Direct x-Prediction paradigm, reformulating restoration as a deterministic manifold projection to recover clean anatomy in a single forward pass, eliminating stochastic sampling. Finally, a Semantic-Structural Alignment (SSA) module anchors the solution using priors from medical foundation models (MedDINOv3), ensuring clinical plausibility. Experiments on synthetic and multi-center clinical datasets show PGMP outperforms state-of-the-art methods on unseen anatomy, setting new benchmarks in efficiency and diagnostic reliability. Code and data: https://github.com/ricoleehduu/PGMP.

Physically-Grounded Manifold Projection with Foundation Priors for Metal Artifact Reduction in Dental CBCT

Metal artifacts in Dental CBCT severely obscure anatomical structures, hindering diagnosis. Current deep learning for Metal Artifact Reduction (MAR) faces limitations: supervised methods suffer from spectral blurring due to "regression-to-the-mean", while unsupervised ones risk structural hallucinations. Denoising Diffusion Models (DDPMs) offer realism but rely on slow, stochastic iterative sampling, unsuitable for clinical use. To resolve this, we propose the Physically-Grounded Manifold Projection (PGMP) framework. First, our Anatomically-Adaptive Physics Simulation (AAPS) pipeline synthesizes high-fidelity training pairs via Monte Carlo spectral modeling and patient-specific digital twins, bridging the synthetic-to-real gap. Second, our DMP-Former adapts the Direct x-Prediction paradigm, reformulating restoration as a deterministic manifold projection to recover clean anatomy in a single forward pass, eliminating stochastic sampling. Finally, a Semantic-Structural Alignment (SSA) module anchors the solution using priors from medical foundation models (MedDINOv3), ensuring clinical plausibility. Experiments on synthetic and multi-center clinical datasets show PGMP outperforms state-of-the-art methods on unseen anatomy, setting new benchmarks in efficiency and diagnostic reliability. Code and data: https://github.com/ricoleehduu/PGMP

RepetitionCurse: Measuring and Understanding Router Imbalance in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs under DoS Stress

Mixture-of-Experts architectures have become the standard for scaling large language models due to their superior parameter efficiency. To accommodate the growing number of experts in practice, modern inference systems commonly adopt expert parallelism to distribute experts across devices. However, the absence of explicit load balancing constraints during inference allows adversarial inputs to trigger severe routing concentration. We demonstrate that out-of-distribution prompts can manipulate the routing strategy such that all tokens are consistently routed to the same set of top-$k$ experts, which creates computational bottlenecks on certain devices while forcing others to idle. This converts an efficiency mechanism into a denial-of-service attack vector, leading to violations of service-level agreements for time to first token. We propose RepetitionCurse, a low-cost black-box strategy to exploit this vulnerability. By identifying a universal flaw in MoE router behavior, RepetitionCurse constructs adversarial prompts using simple repetitive token patterns in a model-agnostic manner. On widely deployed MoE models like Mixtral-8x7B, our method increases end-to-end inference latency by 3.063x, degrading service availability significantly.

USE: A Unified Model for Universal Sound Separation and Extraction

Sound separation (SS) and target sound extraction (TSE) are fundamental techniques for addressing complex acoustic scenarios. While existing SS methods struggle with determining the unknown number of sound sources, TSE approaches require precisely specified clues to achieve optimal performance. This paper proposes a unified framework that synergistically combines SS and TSE to overcome their individual limitations. Our architecture employs two complementary components: 1) An Encoder-Decoder Attractor (EDA) network that automatically infers both the source count and corresponding acoustic clues for SS, and 2) A multi-modal fusion network that precisely interprets diverse user-provided clues (acoustic, semantic, or visual) for TSE. Through joint training with cross-task consistency constraints, we establish a unified latent space that bridges both paradigms. During inference, the system adaptively operates in either fully autonomous SS mode or clue-driven TSE mode. Experiments demonstrate remarkable performance in both tasks, with notable improvements of 1.4 dB SDR improvement in SS compared to baseline and 86\% TSE accuracy.

Seedance 1.5 pro: A Native Audio-Visual Joint Generation Foundation Model

Recent strides in video generation have paved the way for unified audio-visual generation. In this work, we present Seedance 1.5 pro, a foundational model engineered specifically for native, joint audio-video generation. Leveraging a dual-branch Diffusion Transformer architecture, the model integrates a cross-modal joint module with a specialized multi-stage data pipeline, achieving exceptional audio-visual synchronization and superior generation quality. To ensure practical utility, we implement meticulous post-training optimizations, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on high-quality datasets and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with multi-dimensional reward models. Furthermore, we introduce an acceleration framework that boosts inference speed by over 10X. Seedance 1.5 pro distinguishes itself through precise multilingual and dialect lip-syncing, dynamic cinematic camera control, and enhanced narrative coherence, positioning it as a robust engine for professional-grade content creation. Seedance 1.5 pro is now accessible on Volcano Engine at https://console.volcengine.com/ark/region:ark+cn-beijing/experience/vision?type=GenVideo.