Victor
Abstract:While transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically support massive context windows, they suffer from severe performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. We attribute this failure to the attention dispersion in the Softmax mechanism, which prevents the model from concentrating attention. To overcome this, we propose Separate Sequence (SepSeq), a training-free, plug-and-play framework to mitigate dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens. Mechanistically, we demonstrate that separator tokens act as an attention sink, recalibrating attention to focus on local segments while preserving global context. Extensive evaluations on 9 widely-adopted LLMs confirm the effectiveness of our approach: SepSeq yields an average relative accuracy improvement of 35.6% across diverse domains while reducing total inference token consumption by 16.4% on average.
Abstract:Tool-augmented AI agents substantially extend the practical capabilities of large language models, but they also introduce security risks that cannot be identified through model-only evaluation. In this paper, we present a systematic security assessment of six representative OpenClaw-series agent frameworks, namely OpenClaw, AutoClaw, QClaw, KimiClaw, MaxClaw, and ArkClaw, under multiple backbone models. To support this study, we construct a benchmark of 205 test cases covering representative attack behaviors across the full agent execution lifecycle, enabling unified evaluation of risk exposure at both the framework and model levels. Our results show that all evaluated agents exhibit substantial security vulnerabilities, and that agentized systems are significantly riskier than their underlying models used in isolation. In particular, reconnaissance and discovery behaviors emerge as the most common weaknesses, while different frameworks expose distinct high-risk profiles, including credential leakage, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and resource development. These findings indicate that the security of modern agent systems is shaped not only by the safety properties of the backbone model, but also by the coupling among model capability, tool use, multi-step planning, and runtime orchestration. We further show that once an agent is granted execution capability and persistent runtime context, weaknesses arising in early stages can be amplified into concrete system-level failures. Overall, our study highlights the need to move beyond prompt-level safeguards toward lifecycle-wide security governance for intelligent agent frameworks.
Abstract:Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved breakthroughs comparable to traditional numerical models in data-driven weather forecasting, yet it remains essentially statistical fitting and struggles to uncover the physical causal mechanisms of the atmosphere. Physics-oriented mechanism research still heavily relies on domain knowledge and cumbersome engineering operations of human scientists, becoming a bottleneck restricting the efficiency of Earth system science exploration. Here, we propose TianJi - the first "AI meteorologist" system capable of autonomously driving complex numerical models to verify physical mechanisms. Powered by a large language model-driven multi-agent architecture, TianJi can autonomously conduct literature research and generate scientific hypotheses. We further decouple scientific research into cognitive planning and engineering execution: the meta-planner interprets hypotheses and devises experimental roadmaps, while a cohort of specialized worker agents collaboratively complete data preparation, model configuration, and multi-dimensional result analysis. In two classic atmospheric dynamic scenarios (squall-line cold pools and typhoon track deflections), TianJi accomplishes expert-level end-to-end experimental operations with zero human intervention, compressing the research cycle to a few hours. It also delivers detailed result analyses and autonomously judges and explains the validity of the hypotheses from outputs. TianJi reveals that the role of AI in Earth system science is transitioning from a "black-box predictor" to an "interpretable scientific collaborator", offering a new paradigm for high-throughput exploration of scientific mechanisms.
Abstract:Converting a pretrained Transformer into a more efficient hybrid model through distillation offers a promising approach to reducing inference costs. However, achieving high-quality generation in distilled models requires careful joint design of both the student architecture and the distillation process. Many prior distillation works evaluate downstream multiple-choice benchmarks by ranking candidate answers with log-likelihood rather than requiring autoregressive generation, which can obscure important differences in model quality. For example, we show that a 7B parameter distilled model that nearly matches its teacher to within 0.2\,pp under log-likelihood scoring actually falls behind by 20.8\,pp when the model must generate answers autoregressively. We propose a Hybrid Kimi Delta Attention (Hybrid-KDA) architecture paired with GenDistill, a multi-stage distillation pipeline, and use generation-based evaluation throughout to guide design decisions. Applying this approach to Qwen3-0.6B, we systematically ablate six design axes: training objective, loss masking, training duration, dataset selection, parameter freezing, and architecture choice. We find that log-likelihood-based evaluation consistently underestimates the gap between teacher and student, and can in some cases reverse the ranking of design choices, meaning that conclusions drawn from perplexity-only evaluation may be misleading. Among the factors we study, dataset selection, completion-only masking, and freezing attention layers during post-training have the largest impact on generation quality. Our best Hybrid-KDA model retains 86--90\% of teacher accuracy on knowledge benchmarks while reducing KV cache memory by up to 75\% and improving time-to-first-token by 2--4$\times$ at 128K-token contexts.
Abstract:Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have mainly focused on improving final answer correctness and strengthening visual grounding. However, a critical bottleneck remains: although models can attend to relevant visual regions, they often fail to effectively incorporate visual evidence into subsequent reasoning, leading to reasoning chains that are weakly grounded in visual facts. To address this issue, we propose Trajectory-Guided Reinforcement Learning (TGRL), which guides the policy model to integrate visual evidence into fine-grained reasoning processes using expert reasoning trajectories from stronger models. We further introduce token-level reweighting and trajectory filtering to ensure stable and effective policy optimization. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that TGRL consistently improves reasoning performance and effectively bridges the gap between visual perception and logical reasoning.
Abstract:Extending Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) faces a fundamental challenge: their responses inherently interleave perception-related tokens, which ground visual content, with reasoning-related tokens, which construct reasoning chains. These token types instantiate distinct yet interdependent capacities -- visual grounding and symbolic reasoning -- making isolated optimization insufficient. Through token-level empirical analysis, we demonstrate that optimizing either perception- or reasoning-only tokens consistently underperforms full optimization, underscoring their inherent coupling. To address this, we propose a plug-and-play Token-Reweighting (ToR) strategy that explicitly models this interdependence by identifying critical tokens of both types and dynamically reweighting them during RLVR training. Applied on top of existing methods (e.g., GRPO and DAPO), ToR delivers consistent performance gains across multiple multi-modal reasoning benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance with both accurate visual grounding and coherent reasoning.
Abstract:Recent advances in generative recommendation have leveraged pretrained LLMs by formulating sequential recommendation as autoregressive generation over a unified token space comprising language tokens and itemic identifiers, where each item is represented by a compact sequence of discrete tokens, namely Semantic IDs (SIDs). This SID-based formulation enables efficient decoding over large-scale item corpora and provides a natural interface for LLM-based recommenders to leverage rich world knowledge. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in LLM reasoning motivate reasoning-enhanced recommendation, yet effective reasoning over SIDs remains underexplored and challenging. Itemic tokens are not natively meaningful to LLMs; moreover, recommendation-oriented SID reasoning is hard to evaluate, making high-quality supervision scarce. To address these challenges, we propose SIDReasoner, a two-stage framework that elicits reasoning over SIDs by strengthening SID--language alignment to unlock transferable LLM reasoning, rather than relying on large amounts of recommendation-specific reasoning traces. Concretely, SIDReasoner first enhances SID-language alignment via multi-task training on an enriched SID-centered corpus synthesized by a stronger teacher model, grounding itemic tokens in diverse semantic and behavioral contexts. Building on this enhanced alignment, SIDReasoner further improves recommendation reasoning through outcome-driven reinforced optimization, which guides the model toward effective reasoning trajectories without requiring explicit reasoning annotations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our reasoning-augmented SID-based generative recommendation. Beyond accuracy, the results highlight the broader potential of large reasoning models for generative recommendation, including improved interpretability and cross-domain generalization.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models. While existing analyses identify that RLVR-induced changes are sparse, they primarily focus on the \textbf{magnitude} of these updates, largely overlooking their \textbf{direction}. In this work, we argue that the direction of updates is a more critical lens for understanding RLVR's effects, which can be captured by the signed, token-level log probability difference $Δ\log p$ between the base and final RLVR models. Through statistical analysis and token-replacement interventions, we demonstrate that $Δ\log p$ more effectively identifies sparse, yet reasoning-critical updates than magnitude-based metrics (\eg divergence or entropy). Building on this insight, we propose two practical applications: (1) a \textit{test-time extrapolation} method that amplifies the policy along the learned $Δ\log p$ direction to improve reasoning accuracy without further training; (2) a \textit{training-time reweighting} method that focuses learning on low-probability (corresponding to higher $Δ\log p$) tokens, which improves reasoning performance across models and benchmarks. Our work establishes the direction of change as a key principle for analyzing and improving RLVR.
Abstract:While large-scale diffusion models have revolutionized video synthesis, achieving precise control over both multi-subject identity and multi-granularity motion remains a significant challenge. Recent attempts to bridge this gap often suffer from limited motion granularity, control ambiguity, and identity degradation, leading to suboptimal performance on identity preservation and motion control. In this work, we present DreamVideo-Omni, a unified framework enabling harmonious multi-subject customization with omni-motion control via a progressive two-stage training paradigm. In the first stage, we integrate comprehensive control signals for joint training, encompassing subject appearances, global motion, local dynamics, and camera movements. To ensure robust and precise controllability, we introduce a condition-aware 3D rotary positional embedding to coordinate heterogeneous inputs and a hierarchical motion injection strategy to enhance global motion guidance. Furthermore, to resolve multi-subject ambiguity, we introduce group and role embeddings to explicitly anchor motion signals to specific identities, effectively disentangling complex scenes into independent controllable instances. In the second stage, to mitigate identity degradation, we design a latent identity reward feedback learning paradigm by training a latent identity reward model upon a pretrained video diffusion backbone. This provides motion-aware identity rewards in the latent space, prioritizing identity preservation aligned with human preferences. Supported by our curated large-scale dataset and the comprehensive DreamOmni Bench for multi-subject and omni-motion control evaluation, DreamVideo-Omni demonstrates superior performance in generating high-quality videos with precise controllability.
Abstract:Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language reasoning tasks, yet ensuring their safety remains a critical challenge. Recent input-side defenses detect unsafe images with CLIP and prepend safety prefixes to prompts, but they still suffer from inaccurate detection in complex scenes and unstable safety signals during decoding. To address these issues, we propose GuardAlign, a training-free defense framework that integrates two strategies. First, OT-enhanced safety detection leverages optimal transport to measure distribution distances between image patches and unsafe semantics, enabling accurate identification of malicious regions without additional computational cost. Second, cross-modal attentive calibration strengthens the influence of safety prefixes by adaptively reallocating attention across layers, ensuring that safety signals remain consistently activated throughout generation. Extensive evaluations on six representative MLLMs demonstrate that GuardAlign reduces unsafe response rates by up to 39% on SPA-VL, while preserving utility, achieving an improvement on VQAv2 from 78.51% to 79.21%.