LSA: A Long-Short-term Aspect Interest Transformer for Aspect-Based Recommendation

Aspect-based recommendation methods extract aspect terms from reviews, such as price, to model fine-grained user preferences on items, making them a critical approach in personalized recommender systems. Existing methods utilize graphs to represent the relationships among users, items, and aspect terms, modeling user preferences based on graph neural networks. However, they overlook the dynamic nature of user interests - users may temporarily focus on aspects they previously paid little attention to - making it difficult to assign accurate weights to aspect terms for each user-item interaction. In this paper, we propose a long-short-term aspect interest Transformer (LSA) for aspect-based recommendation, which effectively captures the dynamic nature of user preferences by integrating both long-term and short-term aspect interests. Specifically, the short-term interests model the temporal changes in the importance of recently interacted aspect terms, while the long-term interests consider global behavioral patterns, including aspects that users have not interacted with recently. Finally, LSA combines long- and short-term interests to evaluate the importance of aspects within the union of user and item aspect neighbors, therefore accurately assigns aspect weights for each user-item interaction. Experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that LSA improves MSE by 2.55% on average over the best baseline.

RIE-Greedy: Regularization-Induced Exploration for Contextual Bandits

Real-world contextual bandit problems with complex reward models are often tackled with iteratively trained models, such as boosting trees. However, it is difficult to directly apply simple and effective exploration strategies--such as Thompson Sampling or UCB--on top of those black-box estimators. Existing approaches rely on sophisticated assumptions or intractable procedures that are hard to verify and implement in practice. In this work, we explore the use of an exploration-free (pure-greedy) action selection strategy, that exploits the randomness inherent in model fitting process as an intrinsic source of exploration. More specifically, we note that the stochasticity in cross-validation based regularization process can naturally induce Thompson Sampling-like exploration. We show that this regularization-induced exploration is theoretically equivalent to Thompson Sampling in the two-armed bandit case and empirically leads to reliable exploration in large-scale business environments compared to benchmark methods such as epsilon-greedy and other state-of-the-art approaches. Overall, our work reveals how regularized estimator training itself can induce effective exploration, offering both theoretical insight and practical guidance for contextual bandit design.

VLM-DEWM: Dynamic External World Model for Verifiable and Resilient Vision-Language Planning in Manufacturing

Vision-language model (VLM) shows promise for high-level planning in smart manufacturing, yet their deployment in dynamic workcells faces two critical challenges: (1) stateless operation, they cannot persistently track out-of-view states, causing world-state drift; and (2) opaque reasoning, failures are difficult to diagnose, leading to costly blind retries. This paper presents VLM-DEWM, a cognitive architecture that decouples VLM reasoning from world-state management through a persistent, queryable Dynamic External World Model (DEWM). Each VLM decision is structured into an Externalizable Reasoning Trace (ERT), comprising action proposal, world belief, and causal assumption, which is validated against DEWM before execution. When failures occur, discrepancy analysis between predicted and observed states enables targeted recovery instead of global replanning. We evaluate VLM-DEWM on multi-station assembly, large-scale facility exploration, and real-robot recovery under induced failures. Compared to baseline memory-augmented VLM systems, VLM DEWM improves state-tracking accuracy from 56% to 93%, increases recovery success rate from below 5% to 95%, and significantly reduces computational overhead through structured memory. These results establish VLM-DEWM as a verifiable and resilient solution for long-horizon robotic operations in dynamic manufacturing environments.

EverMemBench: Benchmarking Long-Term Interactive Memory in Large Language Models

Long-term conversational memory is essential for LLM-based assistants, yet existing benchmarks focus on dyadic, single-topic dialogues that fail to capture real-world complexity. We introduce EverMemBench, a benchmark featuring multi-party, multi-group conversations spanning over 1 million tokens with temporally evolving information, cross-topic interleaving, and role-specific personas. EverMemBench evaluates memory systems across three dimensions through 1,000+ QA pairs: fine-grained recall, memory awareness, and user profile understanding. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations: (1) multi-hop reasoning collapses in multi-party settings, with even oracle models achieving only 26%; (2) temporal reasoning remains unsolved, requiring version semantics beyond timestamp matching; (3) memory awareness is bottlenecked by retrieval, where current similarity-based methods fail to bridge the semantic gap between queries and implicitly relevant memories. EverMemBench provides a challenging testbed for developing next-generation memory architectures.

AutoMonitor-Bench: Evaluating the Reliability of LLM-Based Misbehavior Monitor

We introduce AutoMonitor-Bench, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the reliability of LLM-based misbehavior monitors across diverse tasks and failure modes. AutoMonitor-Bench consists of 3,010 carefully annotated test samples spanning question answering, code generation, and reasoning, with paired misbehavior and benign instances. We evaluate monitors using two complementary metrics: Miss Rate (MR) and False Alarm Rate (FAR), capturing failures to detect misbehavior and oversensitivity to benign behavior, respectively. Evaluating 12 proprietary and 10 open-source LLMs, we observe substantial variability in monitoring performance and a consistent trade-off between MR and FAR, revealing an inherent safety-utility tension. To further explore the limits of monitor reliability, we construct a large-scale training corpus of 153,581 samples and fine-tune Qwen3-4B-Instruction to investigate whether training on known, relatively easy-to-construct misbehavior datasets improves monitoring performance on unseen and more implicit misbehaviors. Our results highlight the challenges of reliable, scalable misbehavior monitoring and motivate future work on task-aware designing and training strategies for LLM-based monitors.

EverMemOS: A Self-Organizing Memory Operating System for Structured Long-Horizon Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as long-term interactive agents, yet their limited context windows make it difficult to sustain coherent behavior over extended interactions. Existing memory systems often store isolated records and retrieve fragments, limiting their ability to consolidate evolving user states and resolve conflicts. We introduce EverMemOS, a self-organizing memory operating system that implements an engram-inspired lifecycle for computational memory. Episodic Trace Formation converts dialogue streams into MemCells that capture episodic traces, atomic facts, and time-bounded Foresight signals. Semantic Consolidation organizes MemCells into thematic MemScenes, distilling stable semantic structures and updating user profiles. Reconstructive Recollection performs MemScene-guided agentic retrieval to compose the necessary and sufficient context for downstream reasoning. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show that EverMemOS achieves state-of-the-art performance on memory-augmented reasoning tasks. We further report a profile study on PersonaMem v2 and qualitative case studies illustrating chat-oriented capabilities such as user profiling and Foresight. Code is available at https://github.com/EverMind-AI/EverMemOS.

Practical Framework for Privacy-Preserving and Byzantine-robust Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a model without sharing their private data. However, FL is vulnerable to Byzantine attacks, where adversaries manipulate client models to compromise the federated model, and privacy inference attacks, where adversaries exploit client models to infer private data. Existing defenses against both backdoor and privacy inference attacks introduce significant computational and communication overhead, creating a gap between theory and practice. To address this, we propose ABBR, a practical framework for Byzantine-robust and privacy-preserving FL. We are the first to utilize dimensionality reduction to speed up the private computation of complex filtering rules in privacy-preserving FL. Additionally, we analyze the accuracy loss of vector-wise filtering in low-dimensional space and introduce an adaptive tuning strategy to minimize the impact of malicious models that bypass filtering on the global model. We implement ABBR with state-of-the-art Byzantine-robust aggregation rules and evaluate it on public datasets, showing that it runs significantly faster, has minimal communication overhead, and maintains nearly the same Byzantine-resilience as the baselines.

Gradient Surgery for Safe LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning-as-a-Service introduces a critical vulnerability where a few malicious examples mixed into the user's fine-tuning dataset can compromise the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While a recognized paradigm frames safe fine-tuning as a multi-objective optimization problem balancing user task performance with safety alignment, we find existing solutions are critically sensitive to the harmful ratio, with defenses degrading sharply as harmful ratio increases. We diagnose that this failure stems from conflicting gradients, where the user-task update directly undermines the safety objective. To resolve this, we propose SafeGrad, a novel method that employs gradient surgery. When a conflict is detected, SafeGrad nullifies the harmful component of the user-task gradient by projecting it onto the orthogonal plane of the alignment gradient, allowing the model to learn the user's task without sacrificing safety. To further enhance robustness and data efficiency, we employ a KL-divergence alignment loss that learns the rich, distributional safety profile of the well-aligned foundation model. Extensive experiments show that SafeGrad provides state-of-the-art defense across various LLMs and datasets, maintaining robust safety even at high harmful ratios without compromising task fidelity.

Pentest-R1: Towards Autonomous Penetration Testing Reasoning Optimized via Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning

Automating penetration testing is crucial for enhancing cybersecurity, yet current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant limitations in this domain, including poor error handling, inefficient reasoning, and an inability to perform complex end-to-end tasks autonomously. To address these challenges, we introduce Pentest-R1, a novel framework designed to optimize LLM reasoning capabilities for this task through a two-stage reinforcement learning pipeline. We first construct a dataset of over 500 real-world, multi-step walkthroughs, which Pentest-R1 leverages for offline reinforcement learning (RL) to instill foundational attack logic. Subsequently, the LLM is fine-tuned via online RL in an interactive Capture The Flag (CTF) environment, where it learns directly from environmental feedback to develop robust error self-correction and adaptive strategies. Our extensive experiments on the Cybench and AutoPenBench benchmarks demonstrate the framework's effectiveness. On AutoPenBench, Pentest-R1 achieves a 24.2\% success rate, surpassing most state-of-the-art models and ranking second only to Gemini 2.5 Flash. On Cybench, it attains a 15.0\% success rate in unguided tasks, establishing a new state-of-the-art for open-source LLMs and matching the performance of top proprietary models. Ablation studies confirm that the synergy of both training stages is critical to its success.

LSDM: LLM-Enhanced Spatio-temporal Diffusion Model for Service-Level Mobile Traffic Prediction

Service-level mobile traffic prediction for individual users is essential for network efficiency and quality of service enhancement. However, current prediction methods are limited in their adaptability across different urban environments and produce inaccurate results due to the high uncertainty in personal traffic patterns, the lack of detailed environmental context, and the complex dependencies among different network services. These challenges demand advanced modeling techniques that can capture dynamic traffic distributions and rich environmental features. Inspired by the recent success of diffusion models in distribution modeling and Large Language Models (LLMs) in contextual understanding, we propose an LLM-Enhanced Spatio-temporal Diffusion Model (LSDM). LSDM integrates the generative power of diffusion models with the adaptive learning capabilities of transformers, augmented by the ability to capture multimodal environmental information for modeling service-level patterns and dynamics. Extensive evaluations on real-world service-level datasets demonstrate that the model excels in traffic usage predictions, showing outstanding generalization and adaptability. After incorporating contextual information via LLM, the performance improves by at least 2.83% in terms of the coefficient of determination. Compared to models of a similar type, such as CSDI, the root mean squared error can be reduced by at least 8.29%. The code and dataset will be available at: https://github.com/SoftYuaneR/LSDM.