AgentCollab: A Self-Evaluation-Driven Collaboration Paradigm for Efficient LLM Agents

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) perform complex tasks through long-horizon reasoning and tool interaction, where a fundamental trade-off arises between execution efficiency and reasoning robustness. Models at different capability-cost levels offer complementary advantages: lower-cost models enable fast execution but may struggle on difficult reasoning segments, while stronger models provide more robust reasoning at higher computational cost. We present AgentCollab, a self-driven collaborative inference framework that dynamically coordinates models with different reasoning capacities during agent execution. Instead of relying on external routing modules, the framework uses the agent's own self-reflection signal to determine whether the current reasoning trajectory is making meaningful progress, and escalates control to a stronger reasoning tier only when necessary. To further stabilize long-horizon execution, we introduce a difficulty-aware cumulative escalation strategy that allocates additional reasoning budget based on recent failure signals. In our experiments, we instantiate this framework using a two-level small-large model setting. Experiments on diverse multi-step agent benchmarks show that AgentCollab consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier of LLM agents.

CAWM-Mamba: A unified model for infrared-visible image fusion and compound adverse weather restoration

Multimodal Image Fusion (MMIF) integrates complementary information from various modalities to produce clearer and more informative fused images. MMIF under adverse weather is particularly crucial in autonomous driving and UAV monitoring applications. However, existing adverse weather fusion methods generally only tackle single types of degradation such as haze, rain, or snow, and fail when multiple degradations coexist (e.g., haze+rain, rain+snow). To address this challenge, we propose Compound Adverse Weather Mamba (CAWM-Mamba), the first end-to-end framework that jointly performs image fusion and compound weather restoration with unified shared weights. Our network contains three key components: (1) a Weather-Aware Preprocess Module (WAPM) to enhance degraded visible features and extracts global weather embeddings; (2) a Cross-modal Feature Interaction Module (CFIM) to facilitate the alignment of heterogeneous modalities and exchange of complementary features across modalities; and (3) a Wavelet Space State Block (WSSB) that leverages wavelet-domain decomposition to decouple multi-frequency degradations. WSSB includes Freq-SSM, a module that models anisotropic high-frequency degradation without redundancy, and a unified degradation representation mechanism to further improve generalization across complex compound weather conditions. Extensive experiments on the AWMM-100K benchmark and three standard fusion datasets demonstrate that CAWM-Mamba consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both compound and single-weather scenarios. In addition, our fusion results excel in downstream tasks covering semantic segmentation and object detection, confirming the practical value in real-world adverse weather perception. The source code will be available at https://github.com/Feecuin/CAWM-Mamba.

DLLM Agent: See Farther, Run Faster

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) decoding with appealing efficiency and modeling properties, yet their implications for agentic multi-step decision making remain underexplored. We ask a concrete question: when the generation paradigm is changed but the agent framework and supervision are held fixed, do diffusion backbones induce systematically different planning and tool-use behaviors, and do these differences translate into end-to-end efficiency gains? We study this in a controlled setting by instantiating DLLM and AR backbones within the same agent workflow (DeepDiver) and performing matched agent-oriented fine-tuning on the same trajectory data, yielding diffusion-backed DLLM Agents and directly comparable AR agents. Across benchmarks and case studies, we find that, at comparable accuracy, DLLM Agents are on average over 30% faster end to end than AR agents, with some cases exceeding 8x speedup. Conditioned on correct task completion, DLLM Agents also require fewer interaction rounds and tool invocations, consistent with higher planner hit rates that converge earlier to a correct action path with less backtracking. We further identify two practical considerations for deploying diffusion backbones in tool-using agents. First, naive DLLM policies are more prone to structured tool-call failures, necessitating stronger tool-call-specific training to emit valid schemas and arguments. Second, for multi-turn inputs interleaving context and action spans, diffusion-style span corruption requires aligned attention masking to avoid spurious context-action information flow; without such alignment, performance degrades. Finally, we analyze attention dynamics across workflow stages and observe paradigm-specific coordination patterns, suggesting stronger global planning signals in diffusion-backed agents.

JDPNet: A Network Based on Joint Degradation Processing for Underwater Image Enhancement

Given the complexity of underwater environments and the variability of water as a medium, underwater images are inevitably subject to various types of degradation. The degradations present nonlinear coupling rather than simple superposition, which renders the effective processing of such coupled degradations particularly challenging. Most existing methods focus on designing specific branches, modules, or strategies for specific degradations, with little attention paid to the potential information embedded in their coupling. Consequently, they struggle to effectively capture and process the nonlinear interactions of multiple degradations from a bottom-up perspective. To address this issue, we propose JDPNet, a joint degradation processing network, that mines and unifies the potential information inherent in coupled degradations within a unified framework. Specifically, we introduce a joint feature-mining module, along with a probabilistic bootstrap distribution strategy, to facilitate effective mining and unified adjustment of coupled degradation features. Furthermore, to balance color, clarity, and contrast, we design a novel AquaBalanceLoss to guide the network in learning from multiple coupled degradation losses. Experiments on six publicly available underwater datasets, as well as two new datasets constructed in this study, show that JDPNet exhibits state-of-the-art performance while offering a better tradeoff between performance, parameter size, and computational cost.

Towards Efficient Agents: A Co-Design of Inference Architecture and System

The rapid development of large language model (LLM)-based agents has unlocked new possibilities for autonomous multi-turn reasoning and tool-augmented decision-making. However, their real-world deployment is hindered by severe inefficiencies that arise not from isolated model inference, but from the systemic latency accumulated across reasoning loops, context growth, and heterogeneous tool interactions. This paper presents AgentInfer, a unified framework for end-to-end agent acceleration that bridges inference optimization and architectural design. We decompose the problem into four synergistic components: AgentCollab, a hierarchical dual-model reasoning framework that balances large- and small-model usage through dynamic role assignment; AgentSched, a cache-aware hybrid scheduler that minimizes latency under heterogeneous request patterns; AgentSAM, a suffix-automaton-based speculative decoding method that reuses multi-session semantic memory to achieve low-overhead inference acceleration; and AgentCompress, a semantic compression mechanism that asynchronously distills and reorganizes agent memory without disrupting ongoing reasoning. Together, these modules form a Self-Evolution Engine capable of sustaining efficiency and cognitive stability throughout long-horizon reasoning tasks. Experiments on the BrowseComp-zh and DeepDiver benchmarks demonstrate that through the synergistic collaboration of these methods, AgentInfer reduces ineffective token consumption by over 50%, achieving an overall 1.8-2.5 times speedup with preserved accuracy. These results underscore that optimizing for agentic task completion-rather than merely per-token throughput-is the key to building scalable, efficient, and self-improving intelligent systems.

Text-Guided Channel Perturbation and Pretrained Knowledge Integration for Unified Multi-Modality Image Fusion

Multi-modality image fusion enhances scene perception by combining complementary information. Unified models aim to share parameters across modalities for multi-modality image fusion, but large modality differences often cause gradient conflicts, limiting performance. Some methods introduce modality-specific encoders to enhance feature perception and improve fusion quality. However, this strategy reduces generalisation across different fusion tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a unified multi-modality image fusion framework based on channel perturbation and pre-trained knowledge integration (UP-Fusion). To suppress redundant modal information and emphasize key features, we propose the Semantic-Aware Channel Pruning Module (SCPM), which leverages the semantic perception capability of a pre-trained model to filter and enhance multi-modality feature channels. Furthermore, we proposed the Geometric Affine Modulation Module (GAM), which uses original modal features to apply affine transformations on initial fusion features to maintain the feature encoder modal discriminability. Finally, we apply a Text-Guided Channel Perturbation Module (TCPM) during decoding to reshape the channel distribution, reducing the dependence on modality-specific channels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods on both multi-modality image fusion and downstream tasks.

FS-Diff: Semantic guidance and clarity-aware simultaneous multimodal image fusion and super-resolution

As an influential information fusion and low-level vision technique, image fusion integrates complementary information from source images to yield an informative fused image. A few attempts have been made in recent years to jointly realize image fusion and super-resolution. However, in real-world applications such as military reconnaissance and long-range detection missions, the target and background structures in multimodal images are easily corrupted, with low resolution and weak semantic information, which leads to suboptimal results in current fusion techniques. In response, we propose FS-Diff, a semantic guidance and clarity-aware joint image fusion and super-resolution method. FS-Diff unifies image fusion and super-resolution as a conditional generation problem. It leverages semantic guidance from the proposed clarity sensing mechanism for adaptive low-resolution perception and cross-modal feature extraction. Specifically, we initialize the desired fused result as pure Gaussian noise and introduce the bidirectional feature Mamba to extract the global features of the multimodal images. Moreover, utilizing the source images and semantics as conditions, we implement a random iterative denoising process via a modified U-Net network. This network istrained for denoising at multiple noise levels to produce high-resolution fusion results with cross-modal features and abundant semantic information. We also construct a powerful aerial view multiscene (AVMS) benchmark covering 600 pairs of images. Extensive joint image fusion and super-resolution experiments on six public and our AVMS datasets demonstrated that FS-Diff outperforms the state-of-the-art methods at multiple magnifications and can recover richer details and semantics in the fused images. The code is available at https://github.com/XylonXu01/FS-Diff.

FlexiD-Fuse: Flexible number of inputs multi-modal medical image fusion based on diffusion model

Different modalities of medical images provide unique physiological and anatomical information for diseases. Multi-modal medical image fusion integrates useful information from different complementary medical images with different modalities, producing a fused image that comprehensively and objectively reflects lesion characteristics to assist doctors in clinical diagnosis. However, existing fusion methods can only handle a fixed number of modality inputs, such as accepting only two-modal or tri-modal inputs, and cannot directly process varying input quantities, which hinders their application in clinical settings. To tackle this issue, we introduce FlexiD-Fuse, a diffusion-based image fusion network designed to accommodate flexible quantities of input modalities. It can end-to-end process two-modal and tri-modal medical image fusion under the same weight. FlexiD-Fuse transforms the diffusion fusion problem, which supports only fixed-condition inputs, into a maximum likelihood estimation problem based on the diffusion process and hierarchical Bayesian modeling. By incorporating the Expectation-Maximization algorithm into the diffusion sampling iteration process, FlexiD-Fuse can generate high-quality fused images with cross-modal information from source images, independently of the number of input images. We compared the latest two and tri-modal medical image fusion methods, tested them on Harvard datasets, and evaluated them using nine popular metrics. The experimental results show that our method achieves the best performance in medical image fusion with varying inputs. Meanwhile, we conducted extensive extension experiments on infrared-visible, multi-exposure, and multi-focus image fusion tasks with arbitrary numbers, and compared them with the perspective SOTA methods. The results of the extension experiments consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

AWM-Fuse: Multi-Modality Image Fusion for Adverse Weather via Global and Local Text Perception

Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) in adverse weather aims to address the loss of visual information caused by weather-related degradations, providing clearer scene representations. Although less studies have attempted to incorporate textual information to improve semantic perception, they often lack effective categorization and thorough analysis of textual content. In response, we propose AWM-Fuse, a novel fusion method for adverse weather conditions, designed to handle multiple degradations through global and local text perception within a unified, shared weight architecture. In particular, a global feature perception module leverages BLIP-produced captions to extract overall scene features and identify primary degradation types, thus promoting generalization across various adverse weather conditions. Complementing this, the local module employs detailed scene descriptions produced by ChatGPT to concentrate on specific degradation effects through concrete textual cues, thereby capturing finer details. Furthermore, textual descriptions are used to constrain the generation of fusion images, effectively steering the network learning process toward better alignment with real semantic labels, thereby promoting the learning of more meaningful visual features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AWM-Fuse outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in complex weather conditions and downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Feecuin/AWM-Fuse.

MambaTrans: Multimodal Fusion Image Translation via Large Language Model Priors for Downstream Visual Tasks

The goal of multimodal image fusion is to integrate complementary information from infrared and visible images, generating multimodal fused images for downstream tasks. Existing downstream pre-training models are typically trained on visible images. However, the significant pixel distribution differences between visible and multimodal fusion images can degrade downstream task performance, sometimes even below that of using only visible images. This paper explores adapting multimodal fused images with significant modality differences to object detection and semantic segmentation models trained on visible images. To address this, we propose MambaTrans, a novel multimodal fusion image modality translator. MambaTrans uses descriptions from a multimodal large language model and masks from semantic segmentation models as input. Its core component, the Multi-Model State Space Block, combines mask-image-text cross-attention and a 3D-Selective Scan Module, enhancing pure visual capabilities. By leveraging object detection prior knowledge, MambaTrans minimizes detection loss during training and captures long-term dependencies among text, masks, and images. This enables favorable results in pre-trained models without adjusting their parameters. Experiments on public datasets show that MambaTrans effectively improves multimodal image performance in downstream tasks.