Diffusion-Based Cross-Modal Feature Extraction for Multi-Label Classification

Multi-label classification has broad applications and depends on powerful representations capable of capturing multi-label interactions. We introduce \textit{Diff-Feat}, a simple but powerful framework that extracts intermediate features from pre-trained diffusion-Transformer models for images and text, and fuses them for downstream tasks. We observe that for vision tasks, the most discriminative intermediate feature along the diffusion process occurs at the middle step and is located in the middle block in Transformer. In contrast, for language tasks, the best feature occurs at the noise-free step and is located in the deepest block. In particular, we observe a striking phenomenon across varying datasets: a mysterious "Layer $12$" consistently yields the best performance on various downstream classification tasks for images (under DiT-XL/2-256$\times$256). We devise a heuristic local-search algorithm that pinpoints the locally optimal "image-text"$\times$"block-timestep" pair among a few candidates, avoiding an exhaustive grid search. A simple fusion-linear projection followed by addition-of the selected representations yields state-of-the-art performance: 98.6\% mAP on MS-COCO-enhanced and 45.7\% mAP on Visual Genome 500, surpassing strong CNN, graph, and Transformer baselines by a wide margin. t-SNE and clustering metrics further reveal that \textit{Diff-Feat} forms tighter semantic clusters than unimodal counterparts. The code is available at https://github.com/lt-0123/Diff-Feat.

LLM-as-a-Supervisor: Mistaken Therapeutic Behaviors Trigger Targeted Supervisory Feedback

Although large language models (LLMs) hold significant promise in psychotherapy, their direct application in patient-facing scenarios raises ethical and safety concerns. Therefore, this work shifts towards developing an LLM as a supervisor to train real therapists. In addition to the privacy of clinical therapist training data, a fundamental contradiction complicates the training of therapeutic behaviors: clear feedback standards are necessary to ensure a controlled training system, yet there is no absolute "gold standard" for appropriate therapeutic behaviors in practice. In contrast, many common therapeutic mistakes are universal and identifiable, making them effective triggers for targeted feedback that can serve as clearer evidence. Motivated by this, we create a novel therapist-training paradigm: (1) guidelines for mistaken behaviors and targeted correction strategies are first established as standards; (2) a human-in-the-loop dialogue-feedback dataset is then constructed, where a mistake-prone agent intentionally makes standard mistakes during interviews naturally, and a supervisor agent locates and identifies mistakes and provides targeted feedback; (3) after fine-tuning on this dataset, the final supervisor model is provided for real therapist training. The detailed experimental results of automated, human and downstream assessments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on our dataset MATE, can provide high-quality feedback according to the clinical guideline, showing significant potential for the therapist training scenario.

Tail-Risk-Safe Monte Carlo Tree Search under PAC-Level Guarantees

Making decisions with respect to just the expected returns in Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) cannot account for the potential range of high-risk, adverse outcomes associated with a decision. To this end, safety-aware MCTS often consider some constrained variants -- by introducing some form of mean risk measures or hard cost thresholds. These approaches fail to provide rigorous tail-safety guarantees with respect to extreme or high-risk outcomes (denoted as tail-risk), potentially resulting in serious consequence in high-stake scenarios. This paper addresses the problem by developing two novel solutions. We first propose CVaR-MCTS, which embeds a coherent tail risk measure, Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), into MCTS. Our CVaR-MCTS with parameter $\alpha$ achieves explicit tail-risk control over the expected loss in the "worst $(1-\alpha)\%$ scenarios." Second, we further address the estimation bias of tail-risk due to limited samples. We propose Wasserstein-MCTS (or W-MCTS) by introducing a first-order Wasserstein ambiguity set $\mathcal{P}_{\varepsilon_{s}}(s,a)$ with radius $\varepsilon_{s}$ to characterize the uncertainty in tail-risk estimates. We prove PAC tail-safety guarantees for both CVaR-MCTS and W-MCTS and establish their regret. Evaluations on diverse simulated environments demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform existing baselines, effectively achieving robust tail-risk guarantees with improved rewards and stability.

McBE: A Multi-task Chinese Bias Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to various NLP tasks, their inherent biases are gradually disclosed. Therefore, measuring biases in LLMs is crucial to mitigate its ethical risks. However, most existing bias evaluation datasets focus on English and North American culture, and their bias categories are not fully applicable to other cultures. The datasets grounded in the Chinese language and culture are scarce. More importantly, these datasets usually only support single evaluation tasks and cannot evaluate the bias from multiple aspects in LLMs. To address these issues, we present a Multi-task Chinese Bias Evaluation Benchmark (McBE) that includes 4,077 bias evaluation instances, covering 12 single bias categories, 82 subcategories and introducing 5 evaluation tasks, providing extensive category coverage, content diversity, and measuring comprehensiveness. Additionally, we evaluate several popular LLMs from different series and with parameter sizes. In general, all these LLMs demonstrated varying degrees of bias. We conduct an in-depth analysis of results, offering novel insights into bias in LLMs.

A Survey of Automatic Evaluation Methods on Text, Visual and Speech Generations

Recent advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced generative AI capabilities across text, images, and audio. However, automatically evaluating the quality of these generated outputs presents ongoing challenges. Although numerous automatic evaluation methods exist, current research lacks a systematic framework that comprehensively organizes these methods across text, visual, and audio modalities. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive review and a unified taxonomy of automatic evaluation methods for generated content across all three modalities; We identify five fundamental paradigms that characterize existing evaluation approaches across these domains. Our analysis begins by examining evaluation methods for text generation, where techniques are most mature. We then extend this framework to image and audio generation, demonstrating its broad applicability. Finally, we discuss promising directions for future research in cross-modal evaluation methodologies.

Wavelet-based Disentangled Adaptive Normalization for Non-stationary Times Series Forecasting

Forecasting non-stationary time series is a challenging task because their statistical properties often change over time, making it hard for deep models to generalize well. Instance-level normalization techniques can help address shifts in temporal distribution. However, most existing methods overlook the multi-component nature of time series, where different components exhibit distinct non-stationary behaviors. In this paper, we propose Wavelet-based Disentangled Adaptive Normalization (WDAN), a model-agnostic framework designed to address non-stationarity in time series forecasting. WDAN uses discrete wavelet transforms to break down the input into low-frequency trends and high-frequency fluctuations. It then applies tailored normalization strategies to each part. For trend components that exhibit strong non-stationarity, we apply first-order differencing to extract stable features used for predicting normalization parameters. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that WDAN consistently improves forecasting accuracy across various backbone model. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/MonBG/WDAN.

T2I-Eval-R1: Reinforcement Learning-Driven Reasoning for Interpretable Text-to-Image Evaluation

The rapid progress in diffusion-based text-to-image (T2I) generation has created an urgent need for interpretable automatic evaluation methods that can assess the quality of generated images, therefore reducing the human annotation burden. To reduce the prohibitive cost of relying on commercial models for large-scale evaluation, and to improve the reasoning capabilities of open-source models, recent research has explored supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as dedicated T2I evaluators. However, SFT approaches typically rely on high-quality critique datasets, which are either generated by proprietary LLMs-with potential issues of bias and inconsistency-or annotated by humans at high cost, limiting their scalability and generalization. To address these limitations, we propose T2I-Eval-R1, a novel reinforcement learning framework that trains open-source MLLMs using only coarse-grained quality scores, thereby avoiding the need for annotating high-quality interpretable evaluation rationale. Our approach integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into the instruction-tuning process, enabling models to generate both scalar scores and interpretable reasoning chains with only easy accessible annotated judgment scores or preferences. Furthermore, we introduce a continuous reward formulation that encourages score diversity and provides stable optimization signals, leading to more robust and discriminative evaluation behavior. Experimental results on three established T2I meta-evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that T2I-Eval-R1 achieves significantly higher alignment with human assessments and offers more accurate interpretable score rationales compared to strong baseline methods.

CICADA: Cross-Domain Interpretable Coding for Anomaly Detection and Adaptation in Multivariate Time Series

Unsupervised Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in applications across industries. However, existing methods face significant challenges due to data distributional shifts across different domains, which are exacerbated by the non-stationarity of time series over time. Existing models fail to generalize under multiple heterogeneous source domains and emerging unseen new target domains. To fill the research gap, we introduce CICADA (Cross-domain Interpretable Coding for Anomaly Detection and Adaptation), with four key innovations: (1) a mixture of experts (MOE) framework that captures domain-agnostic anomaly features with high flexibility and interpretability; (2) a novel selective meta-learning mechanism to prevent negative transfer between dissimilar domains, (3) an adaptive expansion algorithm for emerging heterogeneous domain expansion, and (4) a hierarchical attention structure that quantifies expert contributions during fusion to enhance interpretability further.Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world industrial datasets demonstrate that CICADA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both cross-domain detection performance and interpretability.

Rack Position Optimization in Large-Scale Heterogeneous Data Centers

As rapidly growing AI computational demands accelerate the need for new hardware installation and maintenance, this work explores optimal data center resource management by balancing operational efficiency with fault tolerance through strategic rack positioning considering diverse resources and locations. Traditional mixed-integer programming (MIP) approaches often struggle with scalability, while heuristic methods may result in significant sub-optimality. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel two-tier optimization framework using a high-level deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model to guide a low-level gradient-based heuristic for local search. The high-level DRL agent employs Leader Reward for optimal rack type ordering, and the low-level heuristic efficiently maps racks to positions, minimizing movement counts and ensuring fault-tolerant resource distribution. This approach allows scalability to over 100,000 positions and 100 rack types. Our method outperformed the gradient-based heuristic by 7\% on average and the MIP solver by over 30\% in objective value. It achieved a 100\% success rate versus MIP's 97.5\% (within a 20-minute limit), completing in just 2 minutes compared to MIP's 1630 minutes (i.e., almost 4 orders of magnitude improvement). Unlike the MIP solver, which showed performance variability under time constraints and high penalties, our algorithm consistently delivered stable, efficient results - an essential feature for large-scale data center management.

SEOE: A Scalable and Reliable Semantic Evaluation Framework for Open Domain Event Detection

Automatic evaluation for Open Domain Event Detection (ODED) is a highly challenging task, because ODED is characterized by a vast diversity of un-constrained output labels from various domains. Nearly all existing evaluation methods for ODED usually first construct evaluation benchmarks with limited labels and domain coverage, and then evaluate ODED methods using metrics based on token-level label matching rules. However, this kind of evaluation framework faces two issues: (1) The limited evaluation benchmarks lack representatives of the real world, making it difficult to accurately reflect the performance of various ODED methods in real-world scenarios; (2) Evaluation metrics based on token-level matching rules fail to capture semantic similarity between predictions and golden labels. To address these two problems above, we propose a scalable and reliable Semantic-level Evaluation framework for Open domain Event detection (SEOE) by constructing a more representative evaluation benchmark and introducing a semantic evaluation metric. Specifically, our proposed framework first constructs a scalable evaluation benchmark that currently includes 564 event types covering 7 major domains, with a cost-effective supplementary annotation strategy to ensure the benchmark's representativeness. The strategy also allows for the supplement of new event types and domains in the future. Then, the proposed SEOE leverages large language models (LLMs) as automatic evaluation agents to compute a semantic F1-score, incorporating fine-grained definitions of semantically similar labels to enhance the reliability of the evaluation. Extensive experiments validate the representatives of the benchmark and the reliability of the semantic evaluation metric. Existing ODED methods are thoroughly evaluated, and the error patterns of predictions are analyzed, revealing several insightful findings.