Deepfake Word Detection by Next-token Prediction using Fine-tuned Whisper

Deepfake speech utterances can be forged by replacing one or more words in a bona fide utterance with semantically different words synthesized by speech generative models. While a dedicated synthetic word detector could be developed, we investigate a cost-effective method that fine-tunes a pre-trained Whisper model to detect synthetic words while transcribing the input utterance via next-token prediction. We further investigate using partially vocoded utterances as the fine-tuning data, thereby reducing the cost of data collection. Our experiments demonstrate that, on in-domain test data, the fine-tuned Whisper yields low synthetic-word detection error rates and transcription error rates. On out-of-domain test data with synthetic words produced by unseen speech generative models, the fine-tuned Whisper remains on par with a dedicated ResNet-based detection model; however, the overall performance degradation calls for strategies to improve its generalization capability.

RhythmBERT: A Self-Supervised Language Model Based on Latent Representations of ECG Waveforms for Heart Disease Detection

Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is crucial for diagnosing heart disease, but most self-supervised learning methods treat ECG as a generic time series, overlooking physiologic semantics and rhythm-level structure. Existing contrastive methods utilize augmentations that distort morphology, whereas generative approaches employ fixed-window segmentation, which misaligns cardiac cycles. To address these limitations, we propose RhythmBERT, a generative ECG language model that considers ECG as a language paradigm by encoding P, QRS, and T segments into symbolic tokens via autoencoder-based latent representations. These discrete tokens capture rhythm semantics, while complementary continuous embeddings retain fine-grained morphology, enabling a unified view of waveform structure and rhythm. RhythmBERT is pretrained on approximately 800,000 unlabeled ECG recordings with a masked prediction objective, allowing it to learn contextual representations in a label-efficient manner. Evaluations show that despite using only a single lead, RhythmBERT achieves comparable or superior performance to strong 12-lead baselines. This generalization extends from prevalent conditions such as atrial fibrillation to clinically challenging cases such as subtle ST-T abnormalities and myocardial infarction. Our results suggest that considering ECG as structured language offers a scalable and physiologically aligned pathway for advancing cardiac analysis.

QuantVLA: Scale-Calibrated Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models unify perception, language, and control for embodied agents but face significant challenges in practical deployment due to rapidly increasing compute and memory demands, especially as models scale to longer horizons and larger backbones. To address these bottlenecks, we introduce QuantVLA, a training-free post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that, to our knowledge, is the first PTQ approach for VLA systems and the first to successfully quantize a diffusion transformer (DiT) action head. QuantVLA incorporates three scale-calibrated components: (1) a selective quantization layout that integerizes all linear layers in both the language backbone and the DiT while keeping attention projections in floating point to preserve the original operator schedule; (2) attention temperature matching, a lightweight per-head scaling mechanism that stabilizes attention logits and is folded into the dequantization scales at inference; and (3) output head balancing, a per-layer residual interface calibration that mitigates post-projection energy drift. The framework requires no additional training, uses only a small unlabeled calibration buffer, and supports integer kernels for low-bit weights and activations while leaving the architecture unchanged. Across representative VLA models on LIBERO, QuantVLA exceeds the task success rates of full-precision baselines, achieves about 70% relative memory savings on the quantized components, and delivers a 1.22x speedup in end-to-end inference latency, providing a practical pathway toward scalable low-bit embodied intelligence under strict compute, memory, and power constraints.

DSDR: Dual-Scale Diversity Regularization for Exploration in LLM Reasoning

Reinforcement learning with verifiers (RLVR) is a central paradigm for improving large language model (LLM) reasoning, yet existing methods often suffer from limited exploration. Policies tend to collapse onto a few reasoning patterns and prematurely stop deep exploration, while conventional entropy regularization introduces only local stochasticity and fails to induce meaningful path-level diversity, leading to weak and unstable learning signals in group-based policy optimization. We propose DSDR, a Dual-Scale Diversity Regularization reinforcement learning framework that decomposes diversity in LLM reasoning into global and coupling components. Globally, DSDR promotes diversity among correct reasoning trajectories to explore distinct solution modes. Locally, it applies a length-invariant, token-level entropy regularization restricted to correct trajectories, preventing entropy collapse within each mode while preserving correctness. The two scales are coupled through a global-to-local allocation mechanism that emphasizes local regularization for more distinctive correct trajectories. We provide theoretical support showing that DSDR preserves optimal correctness under bounded regularization, sustains informative learning signals in group-based optimization, and yields a principled global-to-local coupling rule. Experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in accuracy and pass@k, highlighting the importance of dual-scale diversity for deep exploration in RLVR. Code is available at https://github.com/SUSTechBruce/DSDR.

Event-Triggered Gossip for Distributed Learning

While distributed learning offers a new learning paradigm for distributed network with no central coordination, it is constrained by communication bottleneck between nodes. We develop a new event-triggered gossip framework for distributed learning to reduce inter-node communication overhead. The framework introduces an adaptive communication control mechanism that enables each node to autonomously decide in a fully decentralized fashion when to exchange model information with its neighbors based on local model deviations. We analyze the ergodic convergence of the proposed framework under noconvex objectives and interpret the convergence guarantees under different triggering conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed framework achieves substantially lower communication overhead than the state-of-the-art distributed learning methods, reducing cumulative point-to-point transmissions by \textbf{71.61\%} with only a marginal performance loss, compared with the conventional full-communication baseline.

HiFloat4 Format for Language Model Inference

This paper introduces HiFloat4 (HiF4), a block floating-point data format tailored for deep learning. Each HiF4 unit packs 64 4-bit elements with 32 bits of shared scaling metadata, averaging 4.5 bits per value. The metadata specifies a three-level scaling hierarchy, capturing inter- and intra-group dynamic range while improving the utilization of the representational space. In addition, the large 64-element group size enables matrix multiplications to be executed in a highly fixed-point manner, significantly reducing hardware area and power consumption. To evaluate the proposed format, we conducted inference experiments on several language models, including LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek-V3.1 and LongCat. Results show that HiF4 achieves higher average accuracy than the state-of-the-art NVFP4 format across multiple models and diverse downstream tasks.

Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats

As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. In this work, we evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. Through rigorous comparison across weight-activation and KV-cache tasks, we provide three key insights: (1) INT8 suits narrow-range data, while floating-point formats excel with high-variance data; (2) in 4-bit regimes, HiF4's hierarchical scaling prevents the accuracy collapse seen in integer formats; and (3) HiFloat is fully compatible with state-of-the-art post-training quantization frameworks. Overall, HiFloat provides a solution for high-efficiency LLM inference on NPUs.

AssetFormer: Modular 3D Assets Generation with Autoregressive Transformer

The digital industry demands high-quality, diverse modular 3D assets, especially for user-generated content~(UGC). In this work, we introduce AssetFormer, an autoregressive Transformer-based model designed to generate modular 3D assets from textual descriptions. Our pilot study leverages real-world modular assets collected from online platforms. AssetFormer tackles the challenge of creating assets composed of primitives that adhere to constrained design parameters for various applications. By innovatively adapting module sequencing and decoding techniques inspired by language models, our approach enhances asset generation quality through autoregressive modeling. Initial results indicate the effectiveness of AssetFormer in streamlining asset creation for professional development and UGC scenarios. This work presents a flexible framework extendable to various types of modular 3D assets, contributing to the broader field of 3D content generation. The code is available at https://github.com/Advocate99/AssetFormer.

LQA: A Lightweight Quantized-Adaptive Framework for Vision-Language Models on the Edge

Deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on edge devices is challenged by resource constraints and performance degradation under distribution shifts. While test-time adaptation (TTA) can counteract such shifts, existing methods are too resource-intensive for on-device deployment. To address this challenge, we propose LQA, a lightweight, quantized-adaptive framework for VLMs that combines a modality-aware quantization strategy with gradient-free test-time adaptation. We introduce Selective Hybrid Quantization (SHQ) and a quantized, gradient-free adaptation mechanism to enable robust and efficient VLM deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Experiments across both synthetic and real-world distribution shifts show that LQA improves overall adaptation performance by 4.5\%, uses less memory than full-precision models, and significantly outperforms gradient-based TTA methods, achieving up to 19.9$\times$ lower memory usage across seven open-source datasets. These results demonstrate that LQA offers a practical pathway for robust, privacy-preserving, and efficient VLM deployment on edge devices.

Self-evolving Embodied AI

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system formed by agents and their environment through active perception, embodied cognition, and action interaction. Existing embodied AI remains confined to human-crafted setting, in which agents are trained on given memory and construct models for given tasks, enabling fixed embodiments to interact with relatively static environments. Such methods fail in in-the-wild setting characterized by variable embodiments and dynamic open environments. This paper introduces self-evolving embodied AI, a new paradigm in which agents operate based on their changing state and environment with memory self-updating, task self-switching, environment self-prediction, embodiment self-adaptation, and model self-evolution, aiming to achieve continually adaptive intelligence with autonomous evolution. Specifically, we present the definition, framework, components, and mechanisms of self-evolving embodied AI, systematically review state-of-the-art works for realized components, discuss practical applications, and point out future research directions. We believe that self-evolving embodied AI enables agents to autonomously learn and interact with environments in a human-like manner and provide a new perspective toward general artificial intelligence.