Attention Beyond Neighborhoods: Reviving Transformer for Graph Clustering

Attention mechanisms have become a cornerstone in modern neural networks, driving breakthroughs across diverse domains. However, their application to graph structured data, where capturing topological connections is essential, remains underexplored and underperforming compared to Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly in the graph clustering task. GNN tends to overemphasize neighborhood aggregation, leading to a homogenization of node representations. Conversely, Transformer tends to over globalize, highlighting distant nodes at the expense of meaningful local patterns. This dichotomy raises a key question: Is attention inherently redundant for unsupervised graph learning? To address this, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis, uncovering the complementary weaknesses of GNN and Transformer in graph clustering. Motivated by these insights, we propose the Attentive Graph Clustering Network (AGCN) a novel architecture that reinterprets the notion that graph is attention. AGCN directly embeds the attention mechanism into the graph structure, enabling effective global information extraction while maintaining sensitivity to local topological cues. Our framework incorporates theoretical analysis to contrast AGCN behavior with GNN and Transformer and introduces two innovations: (1) a KV cache mechanism to improve computational efficiency, and (2) a pairwise margin contrastive loss to boost the discriminative capacity of the attention space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AGCN outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Aggregation-aware MLP: An Unsupervised Approach for Graph Message-passing

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a dominant approach to learning graph representations, primarily because of their message-passing mechanisms. However, GNNs typically adopt a fixed aggregator function such as Mean, Max, or Sum without principled reasoning behind the selection. This rigidity, especially in the presence of heterophily, often leads to poor, problem dependent performance. Although some attempts address this by designing more sophisticated aggregation functions, these methods tend to rely heavily on labeled data, which is often scarce in real-world tasks. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised framework, "Aggregation-aware Multilayer Perceptron" (AMLP), which shifts the paradigm from directly crafting aggregation functions to making MLP adaptive to aggregation. Our lightweight approach consists of two key steps: First, we utilize a graph reconstruction method that facilitates high-order grouping effects, and second, we employ a single-layer network to encode varying degrees of heterophily, thereby improving the capacity and applicability of the model. Extensive experiments on node clustering and classification demonstrate the superior performance of AMLP, highlighting its potential for diverse graph learning scenarios.

QFFT, Question-Free Fine-Tuning for Adaptive Reasoning

Recent advancements in Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning models have improved performance on complex tasks, but they suffer from overthinking, which generates redundant reasoning steps, especially for simple questions. This paper revisits the reasoning patterns of Long and Short CoT models, observing that the Short CoT patterns offer concise reasoning efficiently, while the Long CoT patterns excel in challenging scenarios where the Short CoT patterns struggle. To enable models to leverage both patterns, we propose Question-Free Fine-Tuning (QFFT), a fine-tuning approach that removes the input question during training and learns exclusively from Long CoT responses. This approach enables the model to adaptively employ both reasoning patterns: it prioritizes the Short CoT patterns and activates the Long CoT patterns only when necessary. Experiments on various mathematical datasets demonstrate that QFFT reduces average response length by more than 50\%, while achieving performance comparable to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Additionally, QFFT exhibits superior performance compared to SFT in noisy, out-of-domain, and low-resource scenarios.

TGP: Two-modal occupancy prediction with 3D Gaussian and sparse points for 3D Environment Awareness

3D semantic occupancy has rapidly become a research focus in the fields of robotics and autonomous driving environment perception due to its ability to provide more realistic geometric perception and its closer integration with downstream tasks. By performing occupancy prediction of the 3D space in the environment, the ability and robustness of scene understanding can be effectively improved. However, existing occupancy prediction tasks are primarily modeled using voxel or point cloud-based approaches: voxel-based network structures often suffer from the loss of spatial information due to the voxelization process, while point cloud-based methods, although better at retaining spatial location information, face limitations in representing volumetric structural details. To address this issue, we propose a dual-modal prediction method based on 3D Gaussian sets and sparse points, which balances both spatial location and volumetric structural information, achieving higher accuracy in semantic occupancy prediction. Specifically, our method adopts a Transformer-based architecture, taking 3D Gaussian sets, sparse points, and queries as inputs. Through the multi-layer structure of the Transformer, the enhanced queries and 3D Gaussian sets jointly contribute to the semantic occupancy prediction, and an adaptive fusion mechanism integrates the semantic outputs of both modalities to generate the final prediction results. Additionally, to further improve accuracy, we dynamically refine the point cloud at each layer, allowing for more precise location information during occupancy prediction. We conducted experiments on the Occ3DnuScenes dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate superior performance of the proposed method on IoU based metrics.

Beyond the Singular: The Essential Role of Multiple Generations in Effective Benchmark Evaluation and Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant utilities in real-world applications, exhibiting impressive capabilities in natural language processing and understanding. Benchmark evaluations are crucial for assessing the capabilities of LLMs as they can provide a comprehensive assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. However, current evaluation methods often overlook the inherent randomness of LLMs by employing deterministic generation strategies or relying on a single random sample, resulting in unaccounted sampling variance and unreliable benchmark score estimates. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical statistical model that provides a more comprehensive representation of the benchmarking process by incorporating both benchmark characteristics and LLM randomness. We show that leveraging multiple generations improves the accuracy of estimating the benchmark score and reduces variance. We also introduce $\mathbb P\left(\text{correct}\right)$, a prompt-level difficulty score based on correct ratios, providing fine-grained insights into individual prompts. Additionally, we create a data map that visualizes difficulty and semantic prompts, enabling error detection and quality control in benchmark construction.

PDM-SSD: Single-Stage Three-Dimensional Object Detector With Point Dilation

Current Point-based detectors can only learn from the provided points, with limited receptive fields and insufficient global learning capabilities for such targets. In this paper, we present a novel Point Dilation Mechanism for single-stage 3D detection (PDM-SSD) that takes advantage of these two representations. Specifically, we first use a PointNet-style 3D backbone for efficient feature encoding. Then, a neck with Point Dilation Mechanism (PDM) is used to expand the feature space, which involves two key steps: point dilation and feature filling. The former expands points to a certain size grid centered around the sampled points in Euclidean space. The latter fills the unoccupied grid with feature for backpropagation using spherical harmonic coefficients and Gaussian density function in terms of direction and scale. Next, we associate multiple dilation centers and fuse coefficients to obtain sparse grid features through height compression. Finally, we design a hybrid detection head for joint learning, where on one hand, the scene heatmap is predicted to complement the voting point set for improved detection accuracy, and on the other hand, the target probability of detected boxes are calibrated through feature fusion. On the challenging Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute (KITTI) dataset, PDM-SSD achieves state-of-the-art results for multi-class detection among single-modal methods with an inference speed of 68 frames. We also demonstrate the advantages of PDM-SSD in detecting sparse and incomplete objects through numerous object-level instances. Additionally, PDM can serve as an auxiliary network to establish a connection between sampling points and object centers, thereby improving the accuracy of the model without sacrificing inference speed. Our code will be available at https://github.com/AlanLiangC/PDM-SSD.git.

Optimistic ε-Greedy Exploration for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

The Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm is widely used in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, due to the representational limitations of traditional monotonic value decomposition methods, algorithms can underestimate optimal actions, leading policies to suboptimal solutions. To address this challenge, we propose Optimistic $\epsilon$-Greedy Exploration, focusing on enhancing exploration to correct value estimations. The underestimation arises from insufficient sampling of optimal actions during exploration, as our analysis indicated. We introduce an optimistic updating network to identify optimal actions and sample actions from its distribution with a probability of $\epsilon$ during exploration, increasing the selection frequency of optimal actions. Experimental results in various environments reveal that the Optimistic $\epsilon$-Greedy Exploration effectively prevents the algorithm from suboptimal solutions and significantly improves its performance compared to other algorithms.

Double Distillation Network for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning typically employs a centralized training-decentralized execution (CTDE) framework to alleviate the non-stationarity in environment. However, the partial observability during execution may lead to cumulative gap errors gathered by agents, impairing the training of effective collaborative policies. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the Double Distillation Network (DDN), which incorporates two distillation modules aimed at enhancing robust coordination and facilitating the collaboration process under constrained information. The external distillation module uses a global guiding network and a local policy network, employing distillation to reconcile the gap between global training and local execution. In addition, the internal distillation module introduces intrinsic rewards, drawn from state information, to enhance the exploration capabilities of agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDN significantly improves performance across multiple scenarios.

Mixed-Precision Graph Neural Quantization for Low Bit Large Language Models

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is pivotal for deploying large language models (LLMs) within resource-limited settings by significantly reducing resource demands. However, existing PTQ strategies underperform at low bit levels < 3 bits due to the significant difference between the quantized and original weights. To enhance the quantization performance at low bit widths, we introduce a Mixed-precision Graph Neural PTQ (MG-PTQ) approach, employing a graph neural network (GNN) module to capture dependencies among weights and adaptively assign quantization bit-widths. Through the information propagation of the GNN module, our method more effectively captures dependencies among target weights, leading to a more accurate assessment of weight importance and optimized allocation of quantization strategies. Extensive experiments on the WikiText2 and C4 datasets demonstrate that our MG-PTQ method outperforms previous state-of-the-art PTQ method GPTQ, setting new benchmarks for quantization performance under low-bit conditions.

RAG-Instruct: Boosting LLMs with Diverse Retrieval-Augmented Instructions

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, current RAG methods face two limitations: (1) they only cover limited RAG scenarios. (2) They suffer from limited task diversity due to the lack of a general RAG dataset. To address these limitations, we propose RAG-Instruct, a general method for synthesizing diverse and high-quality RAG instruction data based on any source corpus. Our approach leverages (1) five RAG paradigms, which encompass diverse query-document relationships, and (2) instruction simulation, which enhances instruction diversity and quality by utilizing the strengths of existing instruction datasets. Using this method, we construct a 40K instruction dataset from Wikipedia, comprehensively covering diverse RAG scenarios and tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RAG-Instruct effectively enhances LLMs' RAG capabilities, achieving strong zero-shot performance and significantly outperforming various RAG baselines across a diverse set of tasks. RAG-Instruct is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/RAG-Instruct.