DBMIF: a deep balanced multimodal iterative fusion framework for air- and bone-conduction speech enhancement

The performance of conventional speech enhancement systems degrades sharply in extremely low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments where air-conduction (AC) microphones are overwhelmed by ambient noise. Although bone-conduction (BC) sensors offer complementary, noise-tolerant information, existing fusion approaches struggle to maintain consistent performance across a wide range of SNR conditions. To address this limitation, we propose the Deep Balanced Multimodal Iterative Fusion Framework (DBMIF), a three-branch architecture designed to reconstruct high-fidelity speech through rigorous cross-modal interaction. Specifically, grounded in a multi-scale interactive encoder-decoder backbone, the framework orchestrates an iterative attention module and a cross-branch gated module to facilitate adaptive weighting and bidirectional exchange. To complement this dynamic interaction, a balanced-interaction bottleneck is further integrated to learn a compact, stable fused representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DBMIF achieves competitive performance compared with recent unimodal and multimodal baselines in both speech quality and intelligibility across diverse noise types. In downstream ASR tasks, the proposed method reduces the character error rate by at least 2.5 percent compared to competing approaches. These results confirm that DBMIF effectively harnesses the robustness of BC speech while preserving the naturalness of AC speech, ensuring reliability in real-world scenarios. The source code is publicly available at github.com/wyl516w/dbmif.

Closing the Loop: A Control-Theoretic Framework for Provably Stable Time Series Forecasting with LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown exceptional potential in time series forecasting, leveraging their inherent sequential reasoning capabilities to model complex temporal dynamics. However, existing approaches typically employ a naive autoregressive generation strategy. We identify a critical theoretical flaw in this paradigm: during inference, the model operates in an open-loop manner, consuming its own generated outputs recursively. This leads to inevitable error accumulation (exposure bias), where minor early deviations cascade into significant trajectory drift over long horizons. In this paper, we reformulate autoregressive forecasting through the lens of control theory, proposing \textbf{F-LLM} (Feedback-driven LLM), a novel closed-loop framework. Unlike standard methods that passively propagate errors, F-LLM actively stabilizes the trajectory via a learnable residual estimator (Observer) and a feedback controller. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical guarantee that our closed-loop mechanism ensures uniformly bounded error, provided the base model satisfies a local Lipschitz constraint. Extensive experiments demonstrate that F-LLM significantly mitigates error propagation, achieving good performance on time series benchmarks.

DexTac: Learning Contact-aware Visuotactile Policies via Hand-by-hand Teaching

For contact-intensive tasks, the ability to generate policies that produce comprehensive tactile-aware motions is essential. However, existing data collection and skill learning systems for dexterous manipulation often suffer from low-dimensional tactile information. To address this limitation, we propose DexTac, a visuo-tactile manipulation learning framework based on kinesthetic teaching. DexTac captures multi-dimensional tactile data-including contact force distributions and spatial contact regions-directly from human demonstrations. By integrating these rich tactile modalities into a policy network, the resulting contact-aware agent enables a dexterous hand to autonomously select and maintain optimal contact regions during complex interactions. We evaluate our framework on a challenging unimanual injection task. Experimental results demonstrate that DexTac achieves a 91.67% success rate. Notably, in high-precision scenarios involving small-scale syringes, our approach outperforms force-only baselines by 31.67%. These results underscore that learning multi-dimensional tactile priors from human demonstrations is critical for achieving robust, human-like dexterous manipulation in contact-rich environments.

Purification Before Fusion: Toward Mask-Free Speech Enhancement for Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) typically improves recognition accuracy in noisy environments by integrating noise-immune visual cues with audio signals. Nevertheless, high-noise audio inputs are prone to introducing adverse interference into the feature fusion process. To mitigate this, recent AVSR methods often adopt mask-based strategies to filter audio noise during feature interaction and fusion, yet such methods risk discarding semantically relevant information alongside noise. In this work, we propose an end-to-end noise-robust AVSR framework coupled with speech enhancement, eliminating the need for explicit noise mask generation. This framework leverages a Conformer-based bottleneck fusion module to implicitly refine noisy audio features with video assistance. By reducing modality redundancy and enhancing inter-modal interactions, our method preserves speech semantic integrity to achieve robust recognition performance. Experimental evaluations on the public LRS3 benchmark suggest that our method outperforms prior advanced mask-based baselines under noisy conditions.

Causality-Aware Temporal Projection for Video Understanding in Video-LLMs

Recent Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet remain challenged by video understanding tasks that require consistent temporal ordering and causal coherence. Many parameter-efficient Video-LLMs rely on unconstrained bidirectional projectors to model inter-frame interactions, which can blur temporal ordering by allowing later frames to influence earlier representations, without explicit architectural mechanisms to respect the directional nature of video reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose V-CORE, a parameter-efficient framework that introduces explicit temporal ordering constraints for video understanding. V-CORE consists of two key components: (1) Learnable Spatial Aggregation (LSA), which adaptively selects salient spatial tokens to reduce redundancy, and (2) a Causality-Aware Temporal Projector (CATP), which enforces structured unidirectional information flow via block-causal attention and a terminal dynamic summary token acting as a causal sink. This design preserves intra-frame spatial interactions while ensuring that temporal information is aggregated in a strictly ordered manner. With 4-bit QLoRA and a frozen LLM backbone, V-CORE can be trained efficiently on a single consumer GPU. Experiments show that V-CORE achieves strong performance on the challenging NExT-QA benchmark, reaching 61.2% accuracy, and remains competitive across MSVD-QA, MSRVTT-QA, and TGIF-QA, with gains concentrated in temporal and causal reasoning subcategories (+3.5% and +5.2% respectively), directly validating the importance of explicit temporal ordering constraints.

Cross-platform Product Matching Based on Entity Alignment of Knowledge Graph with RAEA model

Product matching aims to identify identical or similar products sold on different platforms. By building knowledge graphs (KGs), the product matching problem can be converted to the Entity Alignment (EA) task, which aims to discover the equivalent entities from diverse KGs. The existing EA methods inadequately utilize both attribute triples and relation triples simultaneously, especially the interactions between them. This paper introduces a two-stage pipeline consisting of rough filter and fine filter to match products from eBay and Amazon. For fine filtering, a new framework for Entity Alignment, Relation-aware and Attribute-aware Graph Attention Networks for Entity Alignment (RAEA), is employed. RAEA focuses on the interactions between attribute triples and relation triples, where the entity representation aggregates the alignment signals from attributes and relations with Attribute-aware Entity Encoder and Relation-aware Graph Attention Networks. The experimental results indicate that the RAEA model achieves significant improvements over 12 baselines on EA task in the cross-lingual dataset DBP15K (6.59% on average Hits@1) and delivers competitive results in the monolingual dataset DWY100K. The source code for experiments on DBP15K and DWY100K is available at github (https://github.com/Mockingjay-liu/RAEA-model-for-Entity-Alignment).

Beyond ReAct: A Planner-Centric Framework for Complex Tool-Augmented LLM Reasoning

Existing tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) encounter significant challenges when processing complex queries. Current frameworks such as ReAct are prone to local optimization traps due to their reliance on incremental decision-making processes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Planner-centric Plan-Execute paradigm that fundamentally resolves local optimization bottlenecks through architectural innovation. Central to our approach is a novel Planner model that performs global Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) planning for complex queries, enabling optimized execution beyond conventional tool coordination. We also introduce ComplexTool-Plan, a large-scale benchmark dataset featuring complex queries that demand sophisticated multi-tool composition and coordination capabilities. Additionally, we develop a two-stage training methodology that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), systematically enhancing the Planner's tool selection accuracy and global planning awareness through structured DAG-based planning. When integrated with a capable executor, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the StableToolBench benchmark for complex user queries, demonstrating superior end-to-end execution capabilities and robust handling of intricate multi-tool workflows.

CAIFormer: A Causal Informed Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Most existing multivariate time series forecasting methods adopt an all-to-all paradigm that feeds all variable histories into a unified model to predict their future values without distinguishing their individual roles. However, this undifferentiated paradigm makes it difficult to identify variable-specific causal influences and often entangles causally relevant information with spurious correlations. To address this limitation, we propose an all-to-one forecasting paradigm that predicts each target variable separately. Specifically, we first construct a Structural Causal Model from observational data and then, for each target variable, we partition the historical sequence into four sub-segments according to the inferred causal structure: endogenous, direct causal, collider causal, and spurious correlation. The prediction relies solely on the first three causally relevant sub-segments, while the spurious correlation sub-segment is excluded. Furthermore, we propose Causal Informed Transformer (CAIFormer), a novel forecasting model comprising three components: Endogenous Sub-segment Prediction Block, Direct Causal Sub-segment Prediction Block, and Collider Causal Sub-segment Prediction Block, which process the endogenous, direct causal, and collider causal sub-segments, respectively. Their outputs are then combined to produce the final prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the CAIFormer.

SLOT: Sample-specific Language Model Optimization at Test-time

We propose SLOT (Sample-specific Language Model Optimization at Test-time), a novel and parameter-efficient test-time inference approach that enhances a language model's ability to more accurately respond to individual prompts. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex instructions, leading to poor performances on those not well represented among general samples. To address this, SLOT conducts few optimization steps at test-time to update a light-weight sample-specific parameter vector. It is added to the final hidden layer before the output head, and enables efficient adaptation by caching the last layer features during per-sample optimization. By minimizing the cross-entropy loss on the input prompt only, SLOT helps the model better aligned with and follow each given instruction. In experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms the compared models across multiple benchmarks and LLMs. For example, Qwen2.5-7B with SLOT achieves an accuracy gain of 8.6% on GSM8K from 57.54% to 66.19%, while DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B with SLOT achieves a SOTA accuracy of 68.69% on GPQA among 70B-level models. Our code is available at https://github.com/maple-research-lab/SLOT.

GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

We propose GoalFlow, an end-to-end autonomous driving method for generating high-quality multimodal trajectories. In autonomous driving scenarios, there is rarely a single suitable trajectory. Recent methods have increasingly focused on modeling multimodal trajectory distributions. However, they suffer from trajectory selection complexity and reduced trajectory quality due to high trajectory divergence and inconsistencies between guidance and scene information. To address these issues, we introduce GoalFlow, a novel method that effectively constrains the generative process to produce high-quality, multimodal trajectories. To resolve the trajectory divergence problem inherent in diffusion-based methods, GoalFlow constrains the generated trajectories by introducing a goal point. GoalFlow establishes a novel scoring mechanism that selects the most appropriate goal point from the candidate points based on scene information. Furthermore, GoalFlow employs an efficient generative method, Flow Matching, to generate multimodal trajectories, and incorporates a refined scoring mechanism to select the optimal trajectory from the candidates. Our experimental results, validated on the Navsim\cite{Dauner2024_navsim}, demonstrate that GoalFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering robust multimodal trajectories for autonomous driving. GoalFlow achieved PDMS of 90.3, significantly surpassing other methods. Compared with other diffusion-policy-based methods, our approach requires only a single denoising step to obtain excellent performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/GoalFlow.