Beyond Low-Rank: Low-Rank Sparse Prompting via Spiking Neural Network and Prompt Factorization

Visual Prompting (VP) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for adapting large-scale pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks by incorporating learnable prompts at the input level. However, existing VP methods typically employ dense pixel-level prompts, which often suffer from redundant perturbations, limited generalization and energy inefficiency. To overcome these limitations, we propose to integrate brain-inspired spiking learning into visual prompt learning tasks. As we know that spiking neuron can perform inexpensive information processing by transmitting the input data into discrete spike trains and return sparse outputs. Inspired by this, we propose \textbf{Lo}w-\textbf{R}ank visual \textbf{S}pike \textbf{P}rompting (LoRSP), a novel framework that learns dynamic low-rank sparse visual prompts naturally via a Spiking neuron learning mechanism. The core idea of LoRSP is to exploit the brain-inspired sparse firing mechanism of spiking neurons to generate pixel-level sparse prompt for each instance. To be specific, we first construct a series of prompt factors via low-rank factorization to capture distinct prompt subspaces. These prompt factors are then fed into an SNN architecture, which performs the integrate-and-fire process to emit spikes. As a result, our LoRSP generates a \emph{sparse} visual prompt while maintaining the low-rank constraint. This design enables instance-specific selective prompting, leading to more compact and robust adaptation across diverse downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on five heterogeneous vision backbones and multiple benchmarks demonstrate that LoRSP achieves competitive performance while requiring fewer tunable parameters compared to existing VP methods.

MoSSP: A Momentum-Based Single-Loop Stochastic Penalty Method for Nonconvex Constrained DC-Regularized Optimization

In this paper, we study a structured class of nonconvex constrained stochastic problems with difference-of-convex (DC) regularization, where the feasible set is possibly nonconvex and the concave part of the DC regularizer is allowed to be nonsmooth. The fundamental challenge lies in maintaining feasibility for nonconvex constraints while achieving favorable oracle complexity. Although single-loop algorithms efficiently solve unconstrained DC optimization problems, their potential for constrained optimization with DC structure remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we develop MoSSP, a Momentum-based Single-loop Stochastic Penalty method for such problems with provable complexity guarantees. The key idea is to apply a single stochastic proximal-gradient step to the Moreau envelope of the penalty plus the convex DC part, with the concave part's proximal mapping computed in parallel. We derive two algorithm variants: a Polyak-momentum version with $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity for finding stochastic $\varepsilon$-KKT points, and an improved $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ version incorporating recursive momentum. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Mining Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Cues for Video Important Person Identification

Identifying key individuals in video scenes is essential for applications such as automated video editing and intelligent surveillance. Current methods primarily focus on static images and immediate visual cues, overlooking the rich spatio-temporal information in videos. This leads to the phenomenon of Temporal Importance Shift (TIS), wherein individuals deemed significant in early frames may be demoted as the entire temporal context is considered. To address this, we introduce the Video Important Person (VIP) identification task, aimed at automatically identifying the most influential individuals in videos while providing textual rationales. We present Temporal-VIP, a large-scale rationale-annotated dataset consisting of 9,249 video segments across 11 categories with aligned importance rationales. To mitigate TIS, we develop the VIP-Net framework, which includes a Social Cue Encoder (SCE) for extracting multi-modal spatio-temporal cues, a Temporal Importance Rectifier (TIR) for hierarchical cue fusion and cross-modal alignment, and VIP Inference for ranking individuals. Experimental results show that VIP-Net achieves 67.3% accuracy, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models (37.5%-53.9%) and yielding a mean rationale similarity of 0.63 to ground truth through feature-guided LLM refinement. The dataset and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/yml2002/Temporal-VIP.

LiveBrowseComp: Are Search Agents Searching, or Just Verifying What They Already Know?

Are LLM-based search agents genuinely searching, or using the web to verify what they already know? We study this question on BrowseComp with three diagnostics. Our analysis reveals Intrinsic Knowledge Dependence (IKD): even with tool access, agents often rely on intrinsic knowledge -- information encoded in the model before retrieval -- rather than on external evidence. Agents answer up to 44.5% of BrowseComp questions without tools, generate more than half of their search queries from internally produced hypotheses rather than retrieved leads, and perform worse than closed-book baselines when answer-supporting evidence is removed. These results suggest that static search benchmarks can reward memory-backed verification rather than evidence-driven discovery, conflating what agents already know with what they can find. We then introduce LiveBrowseComp, a deep-search benchmark designed to evaluate agents beyond intrinsic coverage. It contains 335 human-authored questions whose answers depend on facts published within the 90 days preceding benchmark construction, drawn from six updated sources and filtered to exclude globally salient events. On LiveBrowseComp, all evaluated agents fall below 2% closed-book accuracy, search-augmented scores drop by 25-40 points relative to BrowseComp, and prior model rankings no longer reliably predict performance. LiveBrowseComp is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Forival/LiveBrowseComp.

S2Aligner: Pair-Efficient and Transferable Pre-Training for Sparse Text-Attributed Graphs

Pre-training on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is central to building transferable graph foundation models, where LLM-as-Aligner methods align graph and text representations through the semantic knowledge of large language models. However, these methods usually assume that node texts provide sufficient and reliable supervision, an assumption often violated in real-world sparse TAGs. When textual anchors are missing, noisy, or uneven across domains, graph structures must be aligned with weak semantic evidence, leading to unreliable structure-semantics correspondence and sparsity-induced transfer bias. This paper presents S2Aligner, a sparsity-aware and structure-enhanced LLM-as-Aligner framework for graph-text pre-training on sparse TAGs. The key idea is to decouple semantic alignment from structural modeling, allowing topology-aware signals to enhance alignment without contaminating the shared semantic space. Specifically, S2Aligner decomposes graph-text representations into semantic and structural components, uses structure-oriented reconstruction with consistency control to inject reliable topology cues into text representations, and suppresses inconsistent structural signals under textual sparsity. Moreover, S2Aligner introduces sparsity-aware cross-domain risk balancing, which calibrates domain risks through a global-domain density ratio and downweights unreliable sparse samples via graph reliability estimation. Theoretical analysis shows that this objective reduces cross-domain generalization gaps by controlling domain risk discrepancy. Extensive experiments across diverse graph domains, sparsity levels, and downstream tasks demonstrate that S2Aligner consistently outperforms existing baselines.

Understanding Dynamics of Adam in Zero-Sum Games: An ODE Approach

The remarkable success of the Adam in training neural networks has naturally led to the widespread use of its descent-ascent counterpart, Adam-DA, for solving zero-sum games. Despite its popularity in practice, a rigorous theoretical understanding of Adam-DA still lags behind. In this paper, we derive ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that serve as continuous-time limits of the Adam-DA. These ODEs closely approximate the discrete-time dynamics of Adam-DA, providing a tractable analytical framework for understanding its behavior in zero-sum games. Using this ODE approach, we investigate two fundamental aspects of Adam-DA: local convergence and implicit gradient regularization. Our analysis reveals that the roles of the first- and second-order momentum parameters in zero-sum games are exactly the opposite of their well-documented effects in minimization problems. We validate these predictions through GAN experiments across multiple architectures and datasets, demonstrating the practical implications of this reversed momentum effect.

AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration

Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.

Utility-Oriented Visual Evidence Selection for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Visual evidence selection is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), yet existing methods typically rely on semantic relevance or surface-level similarity, which are often misaligned with the actual utility of visual evidence for downstream reasoning. We reformulate multimodal evidence selection from an information-theoretic perspective by defining evidence utility as the information gain induced on a model's output distribution. To overcome the intractability of answer-space optimization, we introduce a latent notion of evidence helpfulness and theoretically show that, under mild assumptions, ranking evidence by information gain on this latent variable is equivalent to answer-space utility. We further propose a training-free, surrogate-accelerated framework that efficiently estimates evidence utility using lightweight multimodal models. Experiments on MRAG-Bench and Visual-RAG across multiple model families demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art RAG baselines while achieving substantial reductions in computational cost.

Coreset-Induced Conditional Velocity Flow Matching

We propose Coreset-Induced Conditional Velocity Flow Matching (CCVFM), a generative model that augments hierarchical rectified flow with a data-informed source distribution. Hierarchical flow matching models the full conditional velocity law in velocity space, but its inner flow is asked to transport isotropic Gaussian noise to a multimodal target velocity distribution from scratch. Our key observation is that this inner source can be replaced by a closed-form surrogate built from a coreset of the target. CCVFM first compresses the target into weighted atoms using an entropic Sinkhorn coreset and lifts them to a Gaussian mixture. The induced conditional velocity law is then a closed-form Gaussian mixture that can be sampled without a learned neural sampler. A lightweight correction flow, trained from this exact surrogate source, then refines the remaining surrogate-to-target residual rather than learning an entire noise-to-data map. We prove that the surrogate transport cost equals the target--surrogate Wasserstein gap under an explicit compression assumption, whereas the noise-source analogue has a dimension-scale lower bound. We further characterize the conditional second moment of the direct surrogate-source training target and show that its source-dependent excess is small when the surrogate conditional law is close to the true conditional velocity law in mean and covariance. Empirically, on MNIST, CIFAR-10, ImageNet-32, and CelebA-HQ, the proposed method reaches competitive few-step generation under matched architectures.

BabelDOC: Better Layout-Preserving PDF Translation via Intermediate Representation

As global cross-lingual communication intensifies, language barriers in visually rich documents such as PDFs remain a practical bottleneck. Existing document translation pipelines face a tension between linguistic processing and layout preservation: text-oriented Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) systems often discard structural metadata, while document parsers focus on extraction and do not support faithful re-rendering after translation. We introduce BabelDOC, an Intermediate Representation (IR)-based framework for layout-preserving PDF translation. BabelDOC decouples visual layout metadata from semantic content, enabling document-level translation operations such as terminology extraction, cross-page context handling, glossary-constrained generation, and formula placeholdering. The translated content is then re-anchored to the original layout through an adaptive typesetting engine. Experiments on a curated 200-page benchmark, together with human evaluation and multimodal LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, show that BabelDOC improves layout fidelity, visual aesthetics, and terminology consistency over representative baselines, while maintaining competitive translation precision. The open-source toolkit and its interactive downstream applications are publicly available and have attracted over 8.4K GitHub stars and 17 contributors at the time of writing. A demonstration video is also available.