Quantum Incremental Learning with Mixed State Prototypes

Incremental learning models are required to learn new classes sequentially without catastrophic forgetting, while operating under parameter and memory constraints. In the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, although quantum neural networks offer advantages in feature mapping, hardware limitations restrict circuit width. Furthermore, traditional quantum classifiers are constrained by the number of orthogonal basis states, limiting their capacity to accommodate a continually growing number of categories. Thus, we introduce a novel quantum incremental learning framework based on trainable mixed-state prototypes. Its original design incorporates new classes by adding class prototypes rather than increasing the circuit width of the shared quantum backbone. The use of mixed-state prototypes is another key contribution, since they have representation capabilities to represent information than a single pure-state prototype. And the decomposable mixed-state calculation provides lower production costs and a convenient Hilbert-Schmidt (HS) distance metric for classification. Simulation results show that our model achieves high-dimensional feature concentration using a minimal number of qubits, while demonstrating lower computational complexity and robust representation in incremental learning tasks compared with classical baselines.

DataRx: Missingness-Aware Sampling for Safer Large Language Model Task-Specific Fine-Tuning

Task-specific fine-tuning can improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. However, our study reveals that task-specific fine-tuning can also weaken the safety guardrails of aligned LLMs. A widely adopted strategy for preserving safety during fine-tuning is to incorporate safety data. Although previous studies have shown that randomly mixing safety data can alleviate safety degradation, the underlying principle determining why some safety examples are more effective than others still remains unclear. In this paper, we propose DataRx, a missingness-aware sampling method for selecting safety-critical examples. DataRx is based on the hypothesis that a safety sample is more effective when the selected examples provide safety signals that fill the missing parts of LLMs' safety capabilities. DataRx's key insight is leveraging high-dimensional hidden representations rather than discrete tokens to quantify the safety signal gap between the target model's native response and the safety reference response. The results show that, with only 1% additional safety samples from BeaverTails, DataRx reduces the average attack success rate of Llama3-8B-Instruct across seven downstream tasks from 59.23% under random sampling to 13.70%. In addition, DataRx can be combined with the existing safety data synthesis method to further enhance safety defenses during fine-tuning. We hope that DataRx will inspire more data-centric defense research.

TRACE: Ergodic Trajectory Optimization for Active Scene Reconstruction

Existing active reconstruction systems with Gaussian-splatting maps select observations greedily, optimizing a single next-best-view (NBV) at each step and connecting the chosen views by short-horizon path planning. This greedy decoupling disregards the global structure of scene information, producing inefficient trajectories that waste sensing capacity in transit between selected views. In this work, we study active reconstruction as an ergodic coverage problem: the time-averaged spatial statistics of the sensor trajectory should match a target information distribution induced by the current map. Our approach derives this target distribution online from uncertainty and visibility, and calculates ergodic trajectories via a kernel-ergodic horizon planner with gradient flow and footprint depletion, closing the loop between mapping and trajectory optimization. We thoroughly evaluate TRACE on the Replica dataset against the Next-Best-View (NBV) baselines, improving PSNR by 1.5 dB. Code: https://github.com/spikelab-jhu/trace-active-reconstruction.

DynFly: Dynamic-Aware Continuous Trajectory Generation for UAV Vision-Language Navigation in Urban Environments

Recent advances in multimodal large models have significantly improved UAV vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) by enhancing high-level perception and reasoning. However, existing methods mainly focus on predicting discrete actions, local targets, or sparse waypoints, while the continuous transition from navigation intent to executable UAV motion remains weakly modeled. This motion-interface gap limits the continuity, stability, and executability of generated UAV trajectories. To address this gap, we propose DynFly, a dynamic-aware continuous trajectory generation framework that bridges high-level navigation reasoning and executable UAV motion. DynFly bridges high-level navigation intent and continuous UAV motion through a lightweight trajectory generation layer. Specifically, it represents expert trajectories in B-spline control-point space and employs a Spline-DiT generator to learn conditional trajectory generation via flow matching. Furthermore, we introduce UAV-oriented dynamic-aware supervision over position, finite-difference velocity, finite-difference acceleration, heading consistency, and local target alignment, enabling the generated trajectories to better satisfy UAV motion characteristics. And our trajectory generation framework can also be integrated with an existing UAV-VLN framework while preserving its original visual-language reasoning pipeline. Extensive experiments on the OpenUAV UAV-VLN benchmark show that DynFly improves both navigation performance and trajectory quality. On the Test Unseen Full split, DynFly improves the strongest baseline by 4.69 NDTW, 2.40 SDTW, 2.14 SR points and 4.87 OSR points, while reducing NE by 4.51 m.

DataShield: Safety-degrading Data Filtering for LLM Benign Instruction Fine-Tuning

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from degraded safety capabilities even when fine-tuned with benign datasets. However, existing methods for identifying safety-degrading samples in benign datasets suffer from high computational costs and significant noise issues. In this paper, we propose DataShield to efficiently and effectively identify potential safety-degrading samples. Our key intuition is based on the observation that benign fine-tuning increases the overall response compliance of LLMs. DataShield's key technical insight is to quantify each sample's contribution to the model's compliance behavior as its safety degradation score. DataShield consists of three core components: (1) Compliance Vector Extraction, which captures the LLM's compliance behavior tendency; (2) a novel Compliance-Aware Score (CAS), which automatically identifies the optimal safety-critical layer; and (3) Safety-degrading Sample Filtering, which quantifies the projection shift of training data along the compliance direction. Extensive experimental evaluation on Llama3-8B, Llama3.1-8B, and Qwen2.5-7B using the Alpaca and Dolly benign datasets validates our method's effectiveness in identifying high-risk and low-risk data subsets. We also observe that open-ended question answering is more likely to trigger safety degradation, and corresponding responses tend to be longer. We hope this work can provide new insights into data-centric defense methods. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZJunBo/DataShield.

Accelerating ground state search of spatial photonic Ising machines with genetic-simulated annealing hybrid algorithm

Spatial photonic Ising machines (SPIMs) based on spatial light modulators (SLMs) have emerged as highly effective solvers for many tasks, including combinatorial optimization problems and spin-glass simulations. However, traditional SPIMs relying solely on the simulated annealing algorithm require a large number of measurement-feedback iterations to find a relatively optimal solution in complex energy landscapes, suffering from slow convergence and high time cost. Here, we propose an optical genetic-simulated annealing hybrid algorithm to accelerate the ground-state search of SPIMs. GA conducts a global coarse-grained search in the early iteration stage, while SA performs fine-grained local refinement in the late stage. Numerical simulations show that our method enables a higher solution quality of full-rank Max-Cut problems than pure GA or SA at different scales. We also experimentally demonstrate its superiority over conventional algorithms on a gauge-transformation time-division multiplexing SPIM for high-rank optimization problems under the same iteration budget. Our approach can be further developed with other advanced metaheuristic algorithms toward intelligent optical Ising computing systems.

SpatialFly: Geometry-Guided Representation Alignment for UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation in Urban Environments

UAVs play an important role in applications such as autonomous exploration, disaster response, and infrastructure inspection. However, UAV VLN in complex 3D environments remains challenging. A key difficulty is the structural representation mismatch between 2D visual perception and the 3D trajectory decision space, which limits spatial reasoning. To this end, we propose SpatialFly, a geometry-guided spatial representation framework for UAV VLN. Operating on RGB observations without explicit 3D reconstruction, SpatialFly introduces a geometry-guided 2D representation alignment mechanism. Specifically, the geometric prior injection module injects global structural cues into 2D semantic tokens to provide scene-level geometric guidance. The geometry-aware reparameterization module then aligns 2D semantic tokens with 3D geometric tokens through cross-modal attention, followed by gated residual fusion to preserve semantic discrimination. Experimental results show that SpatialFly consistently outperforms state-of-the-art UAV VLN baselines across both seen and unseen environments, reducing NE by 4.03m and improving SR by 1.27% over the strongest baseline on the unseen Full split. Additional trajectory-level analysis shows that SpatialFly produces trajectories with better path alignment and smoother, more stable motion.

Walking Further: Semantic-aware Multimodal Gait Recognition Under Long-Range Conditions

Gait recognition is an emerging biometric technology that enables non-intrusive and hard-to-spoof human identification. However, most existing methods are confined to short-range, unimodal settings and fail to generalize to long-range and cross-distance scenarios under real-world conditions. To address this gap, we present \textbf{LRGait}, the first LiDAR-Camera multimodal benchmark designed for robust long-range gait recognition across diverse outdoor distances and environments. We further propose \textbf{EMGaitNet}, an end-to-end framework tailored for long-range multimodal gait recognition. To bridge the modality gap between RGB images and point clouds, we introduce a semantic-guided fusion pipeline. A CLIP-based Semantic Mining (SeMi) module first extracts human body-part-aware semantic cues, which are then employed to align 2D and 3D features via a Semantic-Guided Alignment (SGA) module within a unified embedding space. A Symmetric Cross-Attention Fusion (SCAF) module hierarchically integrates visual contours and 3D geometric features, and a Spatio-Temporal (ST) module captures global gait dynamics. Extensive experiments on various gait datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.

EventFlash: Towards Efficient MLLMs for Event-Based Vision

Event-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable robust perception in high-speed and low-light scenarios, addressing key limitations of frame-based MLLMs. However, current event-based MLLMs often rely on dense image-like processing paradigms, overlooking the spatiotemporal sparsity of event streams and resulting in high computational cost. In this paper, we propose EventFlash, a novel and efficient MLLM to explore spatiotemporal token sparsification for reducing data redundancy and accelerating inference. Technically, we build EventMind, a large-scale and scene-diverse dataset with over 500k instruction sets, providing both short and long event stream sequences to support our curriculum training strategy. We then present an adaptive temporal window aggregation module for efficient temporal sampling, which adaptively compresses temporal tokens while retaining key temporal cues. Finally, a sparse density-guided attention module is designed to improve spatial token efficiency by selecting informative regions and suppressing empty or sparse areas. Experimental results show that EventFlash achieves a $12.4\times$ throughput improvement over the baseline (EventFlash-Zero) while maintaining comparable performance. It supports long-range event stream processing with up to 1,000 bins, significantly outperforming the 5-bin limit of EventGPT. We believe EventFlash serves as an efficient foundation model for event-based vision.

Feature Entanglement-based Quantum Multimodal Fusion Neural Network

Multimodal learning aims to enhance perceptual and decision-making capabilities by integrating information from diverse sources. However, classical deep learning approaches face a critical trade-off between the high accuracy of black-box feature-level fusion and the interpretability of less outstanding decision-level fusion, alongside the challenges of parameter explosion and complexity. This paper discusses the accuracy-interpretablity-complexity dilemma under the quantum computation framework and propose a feature entanglement-based quantum multimodal fusion neural network. The model is composed of three core components: a classical feed-forward module for unimodal processing, an interpretable quantum fusion block, and a quantum convolutional neural network (QCNN) for deep feature extraction. By leveraging the strong expressive power of quantum, we have reduced the complexity of multimodal fusion and post-processing to linear, and the fusion process also possesses the interpretability of decision-level fusion. The simulation results demonstrate that our model achieves classification accuracy comparable to classical networks with dozens of times of parameters, exhibiting notable stability and performance across multimodal image datasets.