PathBench: A comprehensive comparison benchmark for pathology foundation models towards precision oncology

The emergence of pathology foundation models has revolutionized computational histopathology, enabling highly accurate, generalized whole-slide image analysis for improved cancer diagnosis, and prognosis assessment. While these models show remarkable potential across cancer diagnostics and prognostics, their clinical translation faces critical challenges including variability in optimal model across cancer types, potential data leakage in evaluation, and lack of standardized benchmarks. Without rigorous, unbiased evaluation, even the most advanced PFMs risk remaining confined to research settings, delaying their life-saving applications. Existing benchmarking efforts remain limited by narrow cancer-type focus, potential pretraining data overlaps, or incomplete task coverage. We present PathBench, the first comprehensive benchmark addressing these gaps through: multi-center in-hourse datasets spanning common cancers with rigorous leakage prevention, evaluation across the full clinical spectrum from diagnosis to prognosis, and an automated leaderboard system for continuous model assessment. Our framework incorporates large-scale data, enabling objective comparison of PFMs while reflecting real-world clinical complexity. All evaluation data comes from private medical providers, with strict exclusion of any pretraining usage to avoid data leakage risks. We have collected 15,888 WSIs from 8,549 patients across 10 hospitals, encompassing over 64 diagnosis and prognosis tasks. Currently, our evaluation of 19 PFMs shows that Virchow2 and H-Optimus-1 are the most effective models overall. This work provides researchers with a robust platform for model development and offers clinicians actionable insights into PFM performance across diverse clinical scenarios, ultimately accelerating the translation of these transformative technologies into routine pathology practice.

DeepRec: Towards a Deep Dive Into the Item Space with Large Language Model Based Recommendation

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been introduced into recommender systems (RSs), either to enhance traditional recommendation models (TRMs) or serve as recommendation backbones. However, existing LLM-based RSs often do not fully exploit the complementary advantages of LLMs (e.g., world knowledge and reasoning) and TRMs (e.g., recommendation-specific knowledge and efficiency) to fully explore the item space. To address this, we propose DeepRec, a novel LLM-based RS that enables autonomous multi-turn interactions between LLMs and TRMs for deep exploration of the item space. In each interaction turn, LLMs reason over user preferences and interact with TRMs to retrieve candidate items. After multi-turn interactions, LLMs rank the retrieved items to generate the final recommendations. We adopt reinforcement learning(RL) based optimization and propose novel designs from three aspects: recommendation model based data rollout, recommendation-oriented hierarchical rewards, and a two-stage RL training strategy. For data rollout, we introduce a preference-aware TRM, with which LLMs interact to construct trajectory data. For rewards, we design a hierarchical reward function that involves both process-level and outcome-level rewards to optimize the interaction process and recommendation performance, respectively. For RL training, we develop a two-stage training strategy, where the first stage aims to guide LLMs to interact with TRMs and the second stage focuses on performance improvement. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that DeepRec significantly outperforms both traditional and LLM-based baselines, offering a new paradigm for deep exploration in recommendation systems.

Attributing Response to Context: A Jensen-Shannon Divergence Driven Mechanistic Study of Context Attribution in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) leverages large language models (LLMs) combined with external contexts to enhance the accuracy and reliability of generated responses. However, reliably attributing generated content to specific context segments, context attribution, remains challenging due to the computationally intensive nature of current methods, which often require extensive fine-tuning or human annotation. In this work, we introduce a novel Jensen-Shannon Divergence driven method to Attribute Response to Context (ARC-JSD), enabling efficient and accurate identification of essential context sentences without additional fine-tuning or surrogate modelling. Evaluations on a wide range of RAG benchmarks, such as TyDi QA, Hotpot QA, and Musique, using instruction-tuned LLMs in different scales demonstrate superior accuracy and significant computational efficiency improvements compared to the previous surrogate-based method. Furthermore, our mechanistic analysis reveals specific attention heads and multilayer perceptron (MLP) layers responsible for context attribution, providing valuable insights into the internal workings of RAG models.

MAATS: A Multi-Agent Automated Translation System Based on MQM Evaluation

We present MAATS, a Multi Agent Automated Translation System that leverages the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework as a fine-grained signal for error detection and refinement. MAATS employs multiple specialized AI agents, each focused on a distinct MQM category (e.g., Accuracy, Fluency, Style, Terminology), followed by a synthesis agent that integrates the annotations to iteratively refine translations. This design contrasts with conventional single-agent methods that rely on self-correction. Evaluated across diverse language pairs and Large Language Models (LLMs), MAATS outperforms zero-shot and single-agent baselines with statistically significant gains in both automatic metrics and human assessments. It excels particularly in semantic accuracy, locale adaptation, and linguistically distant language pairs. Qualitative analysis highlights its strengths in multi-layered error diagnosis, omission detection across perspectives, and context-aware refinement. By aligning modular agent roles with interpretable MQM dimensions, MAATS narrows the gap between black-box LLMs and human translation workflows, shifting focus from surface fluency to deeper semantic and contextual fidelity.

Decoupling Classifier for Boosting Few-shot Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

This paper focus on few-shot object detection~(FSOD) and instance segmentation~(FSIS), which requires a model to quickly adapt to novel classes with a few labeled instances. The existing methods severely suffer from bias classification because of the missing label issue which naturally exists in an instance-level few-shot scenario and is first formally proposed by us. Our analysis suggests that the standard classification head of most FSOD or FSIS models needs to be decoupled to mitigate the bias classification. Therefore, we propose an embarrassingly simple but effective method that decouples the standard classifier into two heads. Then, these two individual heads are capable of independently addressing clear positive samples and noisy negative samples which are caused by the missing label. In this way, the model can effectively learn novel classes while mitigating the effects of noisy negative samples. Without bells and whistles, our model without any additional computation cost and parameters consistently outperforms its baseline and state-of-the-art by a large margin on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO benchmarks for FSOD and FSIS tasks. The Code is available at https://csgaobb.github.io/Projects/DCFS.

Scale-invariant Attention

One persistent challenge in LLM research is the development of attention mechanisms that are able to generalise from training on shorter contexts to inference on longer contexts. We propose two conditions that we expect all effective long context attention mechanisms to have: scale-invariant total attention, and scale-invariant attention sparsity. Under a Gaussian assumption, we show that a simple position-dependent transformation of the attention logits is sufficient for these conditions to hold. Experimentally we find that the resulting scale-invariant attention scheme gives considerable benefits in terms of validation loss when zero-shot generalising from training on short contexts to validation on longer contexts, and is effective at long-context retrieval.

MegaScale-MoE: Large-Scale Communication-Efficient Training of Mixture-of-Experts Models in Production

We present MegaScale-MoE, a production system tailored for the efficient training of large-scale mixture-of-experts (MoE) models. MoE emerges as a promising architecture to scale large language models (LLMs) to unprecedented sizes, thereby enhancing model performance. However, existing MoE training systems experience a degradation in training efficiency, exacerbated by the escalating scale of MoE models and the continuous evolution of hardware. Recognizing the pivotal role of efficient communication in enhancing MoE training, MegaScale-MoE customizes communication-efficient parallelism strategies for attention and FFNs in each MoE layer and adopts a holistic approach to overlap communication with computation at both inter- and intra-operator levels. Additionally, MegaScale-MoE applies communication compression with adjusted communication patterns to lower precision, further improving training efficiency. When training a 352B MoE model on 1,440 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, MegaScale-MoE achieves a training throughput of 1.41M tokens/s, improving the efficiency by 1.88$\times$ compared to Megatron-LM. We share our operational experience in accelerating MoE training and hope that by offering our insights in system design, this work will motivate future research in MoE systems.

Are vision language models robust to uncertain inputs?

Robustness against uncertain and ambiguous inputs is a critical challenge for deep learning models. While recent advancements in large scale vision language models (VLMs, e.g. GPT4o) might suggest that increasing model and training dataset size would mitigate this issue, our empirical evaluation shows a more complicated picture. Testing models using two classic uncertainty quantification tasks, anomaly detection and classification under inherently ambiguous conditions, we find that newer and larger VLMs indeed exhibit improved robustness compared to earlier models, but still suffer from a tendency to strictly follow instructions, often causing them to hallucinate confident responses even when faced with unclear or anomalous inputs. Remarkably, for natural images such as ImageNet, this limitation can be overcome without pipeline modifications: simply prompting models to abstain from uncertain predictions enables significant reliability gains, achieving near-perfect robustness in several settings. However, for domain-specific tasks such as galaxy morphology classification, a lack of specialized knowledge prevents reliable uncertainty estimation. Finally, we propose a novel mechanism based on caption diversity to reveal a model's internal uncertainty, enabling practitioners to predict when models will successfully abstain without relying on labeled data.

VeriDebug: A Unified LLM for Verilog Debugging via Contrastive Embedding and Guided Correction

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in debugging for various programming languages. However, the application of LLMs to Verilog debugging remains insufficiently explored. Here, we present VeriDebug, an approach that integrates contrastive representation and guided correction capabilities for automated Verilog debugging. Unlike existing methods, VeriDebug employs an embedding-based technique to accurately retrieve internal information, followed by bug-fixing. VeriDebug unifies Verilog bug detection and correction through a shared parameter space. By simultaneously learning bug patterns and fixes, it streamlines debugging via contrastive embedding and guided correction. Empirical results show the efficacy of VeriDebug in enhancing Verilog debugging. Our VeriDebugLoc, Type model achieves 64.7 accuracy in bug fixing (Acc1), a significant improvement from the existing open-source SOTAs 11.3. This performance not only outperforms open-source alternatives but also exceeds larger closed-source models like GPT-3.5-turbo (36.6), offering a more accurate alternative to conventional debugging methods.

Insights from Verification: Training a Verilog Generation LLM with Reinforcement Learning with Testbench Feedback

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in Verilog generation from natural language description. However, ensuring the functional correctness of the generated code remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces a method that integrates verification insights from testbench into the training of Verilog generation LLMs, aligning the training with the fundamental goal of hardware design: functional correctness. The main obstacle in using LLMs for Verilog code generation is the lack of sufficient functional verification data, particularly testbenches paired with design specifications and code. To address this problem, we introduce an automatic testbench generation pipeline that decomposes the process and uses feedback from the Verilog compiler simulator (VCS) to reduce hallucination and ensure correctness. We then use the testbench to evaluate the generated codes and collect them for further training, where verification insights are introduced. Our method applies reinforcement learning (RL), specifically direct preference optimization (DPO), to align Verilog code generation with functional correctness by training preference pairs based on testbench outcomes. In evaluations on VerilogEval-Machine, VerilogEval-Human, RTLLM v1.1, RTLLM v2, and VerilogEval v2, our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating functionally correct Verilog code. We open source all training code, data, and models at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VeriPrefer-E88B.