United Minds or Isolated Agents? Exploring Coordination of LLMs under Cognitive Load Theory

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a notable performance ceiling on complex, multi-faceted tasks, as they often fail to integrate diverse information or adhere to multiple constraints. We posit that such limitation arises when the demands of a task exceed the LLM's effective cognitive load capacity. This interpretation draws a strong analogy to Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) in cognitive science, which explains similar performance boundaries in the human mind, and is further supported by emerging evidence that reveals LLMs have bounded working memory characteristics. Building upon this CLT-grounded understanding, we introduce CoThinker, a novel LLM-based multi-agent framework designed to mitigate cognitive overload and enhance collaborative problem-solving abilities. CoThinker operationalizes CLT principles by distributing intrinsic cognitive load through agent specialization and managing transactional load via structured communication and a collective working memory. We empirically validate CoThinker on complex problem-solving tasks and fabricated high cognitive load scenarios, demonstrating improvements over existing multi-agent baselines in solution quality and efficiency. Our analysis reveals characteristic interaction patterns, providing insights into the emergence of collective cognition and effective load management, thus offering a principled approach to overcoming LLM performance ceilings.

Mesh-RFT: Enhancing Mesh Generation via Fine-grained Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Existing pretrained models for 3D mesh generation often suffer from data biases and produce low-quality results, while global reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on object-level rewards that struggle to capture local structure details. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{Mesh-RFT}, a novel fine-grained reinforcement fine-tuning framework that employs Masked Direct Preference Optimization (M-DPO) to enable localized refinement via quality-aware face masking. To facilitate efficient quality evaluation, we introduce an objective topology-aware scoring system to evaluate geometric integrity and topological regularity at both object and face levels through two metrics: Boundary Edge Ratio (BER) and Topology Score (TS). By integrating these metrics into a fine-grained RL strategy, Mesh-RFT becomes the first method to optimize mesh quality at the granularity of individual faces, resolving localized errors while preserving global coherence. Experiment results show that our M-DPO approach reduces Hausdorff Distance (HD) by 24.6\% and improves Topology Score (TS) by 3.8\% over pre-trained models, while outperforming global DPO methods with a 17.4\% HD reduction and 4.9\% TS gain. These results demonstrate Mesh-RFT's ability to improve geometric integrity and topological regularity, achieving new state-of-the-art performance in production-ready mesh generation. Project Page: \href{https://hitcslj.github.io/mesh-rft/}{this https URL}.

FreeMesh: Boosting Mesh Generation with Coordinates Merging

The next-coordinate prediction paradigm has emerged as the de facto standard in current auto-regressive mesh generation methods. Despite their effectiveness, there is no efficient measurement for the various tokenizers that serialize meshes into sequences. In this paper, we introduce a new metric Per-Token-Mesh-Entropy (PTME) to evaluate the existing mesh tokenizers theoretically without any training. Building upon PTME, we propose a plug-and-play tokenization technique called coordinate merging. It further improves the compression ratios of existing tokenizers by rearranging and merging the most frequent patterns of coordinates. Through experiments on various tokenization methods like MeshXL, MeshAnything V2, and Edgerunner, we further validate the performance of our method. We hope that the proposed PTME and coordinate merging can enhance the existing mesh tokenizers and guide the further development of native mesh generation.

D$^{2}$MoE: Dual Routing and Dynamic Scheduling for Efficient On-Device MoE-based LLM Serving

The mixture of experts (MoE) model is a sparse variant of large language models (LLMs), designed to hold a better balance between intelligent capability and computational overhead. Despite its benefits, MoE is still too expensive to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices, especially with the demands of on-device inference services. Recent research efforts often apply model compression techniques, such as quantization, pruning and merging, to restrict MoE complexity. Unfortunately, due to their predefined static model optimization strategies, they cannot always achieve the desired quality-overhead trade-off when handling multiple requests, finally degrading the on-device quality of service. These limitations motivate us to propose the D$^2$MoE, an algorithm-system co-design framework that matches diverse task requirements by dynamically allocating the most proper bit-width to each expert. Specifically, inspired by the nested structure of matryoshka dolls, we propose the matryoshka weight quantization (MWQ) to progressively compress expert weights in a bit-nested manner and reduce the required runtime memory. On top of it, we further optimize the I/O-computation pipeline and design a heuristic scheduling algorithm following our hottest-expert-bit-first (HEBF) principle, which maximizes the expert parallelism between I/O and computation queue under constrained memory budgets, thus significantly reducing the idle temporal bubbles waiting for the experts to load. Evaluations on real edge devices show that D$^2$MoE improves the overall inference throughput by up to 1.39$\times$ and reduces the peak memory footprint by up to 53% over the latest on-device inference frameworks, while still preserving comparable serving accuracy as its INT8 counterparts.

BoxSeg: Quality-Aware and Peer-Assisted Learning for Box-supervised Instance Segmentation

Box-supervised instance segmentation methods aim to achieve instance segmentation with only box annotations. Recent methods have demonstrated the effectiveness of acquiring high-quality pseudo masks under the teacher-student framework. Building upon this foundation, we propose a BoxSeg framework involving two novel and general modules named the Quality-Aware Module (QAM) and the Peer-assisted Copy-paste (PC). The QAM obtains high-quality pseudo masks and better measures the mask quality to help reduce the effect of noisy masks, by leveraging the quality-aware multi-mask complementation mechanism. The PC imitates Peer-Assisted Learning to further improve the quality of the low-quality masks with the guidance of the obtained high-quality pseudo masks. Theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate the proposed QAM and PC are effective. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our BoxSeg over the state-of-the-art methods, and illustrate the QAM and PC can be applied to improve other models.

Orchestrating Joint Offloading and Scheduling for Low-Latency Edge SLAM

Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) is a prevailing technology for many emerging robotic applications. Achieving real-time SLAM on mobile robotic systems with limited computational resources is challenging because the complexity of SLAM algorithms increases over time. This restriction can be lifted by offloading computations to edge servers, forming the emerging paradigm of edge-assisted SLAM. Nevertheless, the exogenous and stochastic input processes affect the dynamics of the edge-assisted SLAM system. Moreover, the requirements of clients on SLAM metrics change over time, exerting implicit and time-varying effects on the system. In this paper, we aim to push the limit beyond existing edge-assist SLAM by proposing a new architecture that can handle the input-driven processes and also satisfy clients' implicit and time-varying requirements. The key innovations of our work involve a regional feature prediction method for importance-aware local data processing, a configuration adaptation policy that integrates data compression/decompression and task offloading, and an input-dependent learning framework for task scheduling with constraint satisfaction. Extensive experiments prove that our architecture improves pose estimation accuracy and saves up to 47% of communication costs compared with a popular edge-assisted SLAM system, as well as effectively satisfies the clients' requirements.

Towards Robust and Realistic Human Pose Estimation via WiFi Signals

Robust WiFi-based human pose estimation is a challenging task that bridges discrete and subtle WiFi signals to human skeletons. This paper revisits this problem and reveals two critical yet overlooked issues: 1) cross-domain gap, i.e., due to significant variations between source-target domain pose distributions; and 2) structural fidelity gap, i.e., predicted skeletal poses manifest distorted topology, usually with misplaced joints and disproportionate bone lengths. This paper fills these gaps by reformulating the task into a novel two-phase framework dubbed DT-Pose: Domain-consistent representation learning and Topology-constrained Pose decoding. Concretely, we first propose a temporal-consistent contrastive learning strategy with uniformity regularization, coupled with self-supervised masking-reconstruction operations, to enable robust learning of domain-consistent and motion-discriminative WiFi-specific representations. Beyond this, we introduce a simple yet effective pose decoder with task prompts, which integrates Graph Convolution Network (GCN) and Transformer layers to constrain the topology structure of the generated skeleton by exploring the adjacent-overarching relationships among human joints. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmark datasets highlight the superior performance of our method in tackling these fundamental challenges in both 2D/3D human pose estimation tasks.

RORem: Training a Robust Object Remover with Human-in-the-Loop

Despite the significant advancements, existing object removal methods struggle with incomplete removal, incorrect content synthesis and blurry synthesized regions, resulting in low success rates. Such issues are mainly caused by the lack of high-quality paired training data, as well as the self-supervised training paradigm adopted in these methods, which forces the model to in-paint the masked regions, leading to ambiguity between synthesizing the masked objects and restoring the background. To address these issues, we propose a semi-supervised learning strategy with human-in-the-loop to create high-quality paired training data, aiming to train a Robust Object Remover (RORem). We first collect 60K training pairs from open-source datasets to train an initial object removal model for generating removal samples, and then utilize human feedback to select a set of high-quality object removal pairs, with which we train a discriminator to automate the following training data generation process. By iterating this process for several rounds, we finally obtain a substantial object removal dataset with over 200K pairs. Fine-tuning the pre-trained stable diffusion model with this dataset, we obtain our RORem, which demonstrates state-of-the-art object removal performance in terms of both reliability and image quality. Particularly, RORem improves the object removal success rate over previous methods by more than 18\%. The dataset, source code and trained model are available at https://github.com/leeruibin/RORem.

Facial Expression Analysis and Its Potentials in IoT Systems: A Contemporary Survey

Facial expressions convey human emotions and can be categorized into macro-expressions (MaEs) and micro-expressions (MiEs) based on duration and intensity. While MaEs are voluntary and easily recognized, MiEs are involuntary, rapid, and can reveal concealed emotions. The integration of facial expression analysis with Internet-of-Thing (IoT) systems has significant potential across diverse scenarios. IoT-enhanced MaE analysis enables real-time monitoring of patient emotions, facilitating improved mental health care in smart healthcare. Similarly, IoT-based MiE detection enhances surveillance accuracy and threat detection in smart security. This work aims at providing a comprehensive overview of research progress in facial expression analysis and explores its integration with IoT systems. We discuss the distinctions between our work and existing surveys, elaborate on advancements in MaE and MiE techniques across various learning paradigms, and examine their potential applications in IoT. We highlight challenges and future directions for the convergence of facial expression-based technologies and IoT systems, aiming to foster innovation in this domain. By presenting recent developments and practical applications, this study offers a systematic understanding of how facial expression analysis can enhance IoT systems in healthcare, security, and beyond.

Unleashing the Power of Continual Learning on Non-Centralized Devices: A Survey

Non-Centralized Continual Learning (NCCL) has become an emerging paradigm for enabling distributed devices such as vehicles and servers to handle streaming data from a joint non-stationary environment. To achieve high reliability and scalability in deploying this paradigm in distributed systems, it is essential to conquer challenges stemming from both spatial and temporal dimensions, manifesting as distribution shifts, catastrophic forgetting, heterogeneity, and privacy issues. This survey focuses on a comprehensive examination of the development of the non-centralized continual learning algorithms and the real-world deployment across distributed devices. We begin with an introduction to the background and fundamentals of non-centralized learning and continual learning. Then, we review existing solutions from three levels to represent how existing techniques alleviate the catastrophic forgetting and distribution shift. Additionally, we delve into the various types of heterogeneity issues, security, and privacy attributes, as well as real-world applications across three prevalent scenarios. Furthermore, we establish a large-scale benchmark to revisit this problem and analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art NCCL approaches. Finally, we discuss the important challenges and future research directions in NCCL.