ArcAD: Anomaly-Rectified Calibration for Cold-Start Supervised Anomaly Detection

The deployment of Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) in real-world manufacturing frequently encounters a challenging cold-start bottleneck, in which limited normal samples fail to represent the full normal distribution and only a few anomalies are available. Under such a regime, existing methods struggle to form compact normal boundaries and fail to effectively exploit supervised signals from rare defects. To address this challenge, we propose Anomaly-Rectified Cold-start AD (ArcAD), a plug-and-play calibration framework for reconstruction-based IAD baselines. ArcAD follows a push-pull learning paradigm to construct a compact and discriminative normal boundary under data scarcity. On the one hand, ArcAD projects limited normal samples onto a hypersphere and pulls them into multiple compact clusters to maximize coverage of the normal manifold. On the other hand, it synthesizes pseudo-anomalies on the hypersphere and leverages real anomalies to push the boundary inward and sharpen anomaly discrimination. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD, VisA, Real-IAD, and MANTA demonstrate that ArcAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods in both single-class and multi-class settings under cold-start conditions. Code is available at: https://github.com/LGC-AD/ArcAD.

Decision-Weighted Flow Matching for Contextual Stochastic Optimization

Conditional generative models are increasingly used as scenario generators for stochastic optimization, but standard training objectives emphasize uniform distributional fit rather than the downstream decisions induced by generated scenarios. This creates an objective mismatch: errors in statistically common regions may have little effect on decision regret, whereas errors in decision-sensitive regions can substantially change the optimal action. We propose Decision-Weighted Flow Matching (DW-FM), a regret-aligned training framework that preserves the simplicity of standard flow matching while reweighting its velocity-regression objective using decision-sensitive endpoint information. Theoretically, we connect downstream regret to pathwise velocity mismatch through a loss-induced decision discrepancy and an adjoint transport argument, yielding an ideal regret-aligned surrogate and practical endpoint-weighted objectives with regret guarantees. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DW-FM on three CVaR-based contextual stochastic optimization benchmarks spanning synthetic portfolio, semi-real financial, and traffic-CVaR tasks, where DW-FM improves downstream regret over standard baselines.

ConMem: Structured Memory-Guided Adaptation in Training-Free Multi-Agent Systems

Recent advances have improved the adaptive capabilities of LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) through memory-, skill-, and learning-based approaches, yet these approaches remain challenged by noisy trajectories, insufficient modeling of memory-skill relations, and reliance on additional training or high-quality supervision. To address these limitations, we propose ConMem, a relation-aware and training-free framework that enables efficient multi-agent adaptation through cross-experience coordination. Specifically, ConMem distills historical interaction trajectories into structured memory cards to capture reusable strategies and cues, organizing them into a relation-aware memory graph. At runtime, ConMem retrieves cards according to task needs and coordinates them through the card graph to resolve strategy conflicts and recover their dependencies. Combined, these modules yield structured and relation-aware guidance, enabling robust, lightweight adaptation in multi-agent systems without additional training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and mainstream MAS architectures show consistent gains over existing memory architectures, with improved inference-time efficiency through pruning more than 50% of expanded candidates and reducing planning overhead by over 80%. Our codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ConMemCode

Detect by Yourself: Self-Designing Agentic Workflows for Few-Shot Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection aims to identify anomaly nodes in attributed graphs and plays an important role in real-world applications. However, existing graph anomaly detection methods still face two key challenges: 1) fixed pipelines, which restrict their adaptability across different graph tasks under limited supervision; 2) weak evidence, which prevents them from explicitly incorporating contextual and structural anomaly signals into the detection process. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, self-designing agentic workflows for few-shot graph anomaly detection (SignGAD). Specifically, we propose a novel paradigm that reformulates graph anomaly detection task from training a fixed anomaly detector to designing task-conditioned detection workflows. By constructing detection workflows, SignGAD selects suitable graph encodings and detector designs to exploit task-specific anomaly evidence. Meanwhile, we introduce a guarded final refit strategy to refine the selected workflow by calibrating refit acceptance, enhancing reliability under limited supervision. Extensive experiments conducted on several real-world datasets demonstrate that SignGAD achieves strong performance against state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness on graph anomaly detection tasks.

CoopGuard: Stateful Cooperative Agents Safeguarding LLMs Against Evolving Multi-Round Attacks

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in complex applications, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks raises urgent safety concerns, especially those evolving over multi-round interactions. Existing defenses are largely reactive and struggle to adapt as adversaries refine strategies across rounds. In this work, we propose CoopGuard , a stateful multi-round LLM defense framework based on cooperative agents that maintains and updates an internal defense state to counter evolving attacks. It employs three specialized agents (Deferring Agent, Tempting Agent, and Forensic Agent) for complementary round-level strategies, coordinated by System Agent, which conditions decisions on the evolving defense state (interaction history) and orchestrates agents over time. To evaluate evolving threats, we introduce the EMRA benchmark with 5,200 adversarial samples across 8 attack types, simulating progressively LLM multi-round attacks. Experiments show that CoopGuard reduces attack success rate by 78.9% over state-of-the-art defenses, while improving deceptive rate by 186% and reducing attack efficiency by 167.9%, offering a more comprehensive assessment of multi-round defense. These results demonstrate that CoopGuard provides robust protection for LLMs in multi-round adversarial scenarios.

FreeAct: Freeing Activations for LLM Quantization

Quantization is pivotal for mitigating the significant memory and computational overhead of Large Language Models (LLMs). While emerging transformation-based methods have successfully enhanced quantization by projecting feature spaces onto smoother manifolds using orthogonal matrices, they typically enforce a rigid one-to-one transformation constraint. This static approach fails to account for the dynamic patterns inherent in input activations, particularly within diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), where varying token types exhibit distinct distributions. To advance this, we propose FreeAct, a novel quantization framework that relaxes the static one-to-one constraint to accommodate dynamic activation disparities. Theoretically, we leverage the rank-deficient nature of activations to derive a solution space that extends beyond simple inverse matrices, enabling the decoupling of activation transformations from weights. Methodologically, FreeAct identifies token-specific dynamics (i.e., vision v.s. text, or masked tokens) and allocates distinct transformation matrices to the activation side, while maintaining a unified, static transformation for the weights. Extensive experiments across dLLMs and MLLMs demonstrate that FreeAct significantly outperforms baselines, up to 5.3% performance improvement, with in-depth analyses. Our code will be publicly released.

Do All Individual Layers Help? An Empirical Study of Task-Interfering Layers in Vision-Language Models

Current VLMs have demonstrated capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks. Typically, in a pretrained VLM, all layers are engaged by default to make predictions on downstream tasks. We find that intervening on a single layer, such as by zeroing its parameters, can improve the performance on certain tasks, indicating that some layers hinder rather than help downstream tasks. We systematically investigate how individual layers influence different tasks via layer intervention. Specifically, we measure the change in performance relative to the base model after intervening on each layer and observe improvements when bypassing specific layers. This improvement can be generalizable across models and datasets, indicating the presence of Task-Interfering Layers that harm downstream tasks' performance. We introduce Task-Layer Interaction Vector, which quantifies the effect of intervening on each layer of a VLM given a task. These task-interfering layers exhibit task-specific sensitivity patterns: tasks requiring similar capabilities show consistent response trends under layer interventions, as evidenced by the high similarity in their task-layer interaction vectors. Inspired by these findings, we propose TaLo (Task-Adaptive Layer Knockout), a training-free, test-time adaptation method that dynamically identifies and bypasses the most interfering layer for a given task. Without parameter updates, TaLo improves performance across various models and datasets, including boosting Qwen-VL's accuracy on the Maps task in ScienceQA by up to 16.6%. Our work reveals an unexpected form of modularity in pretrained VLMs and provides a plug-and-play, training-free mechanism to unlock hidden capabilities at inference time. The source code will be publicly available.

Inject Once Survive Later: Backdooring Vision-Language-Action Models to Persist Through Downstream Fine-tuning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become foundational to modern embodied AI systems. By integrating visual perception, language understanding, and action planning, they enable general-purpose task execution across diverse environments. Despite their importance, the security of VLA models remains underexplored -- particularly in the context of backdoor attacks, which pose realistic threats in physical-world deployments. While recent methods attempt to inject backdoors into VLA models, these backdoors are easily erased during downstream adaptation, as user-side fine-tuning with clean data significantly alters model parameters, rendering them impractical for real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose INFUSE (INjection into Fine-tUne-inSensitive modulEs), the first backdoor attack framework for VLA base models that remains effective even with arbitrary user fine-tuning. INFUSE begins by analyzing parameter sensitivity across diverse fine-tuning scenarios to identify modules that remain largely unchanged -- the fine-tune-insensitive modules. It then injects backdoors into these stable modules while freezing the rest, ensuring malicious behavior persists after extensive user fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments across multiple VLA architectures demonstrate INFUSE's effectiveness. After user-side fine-tuning, INFUSE maintains mean attack success rates of 91.0% on simulation environments and 79.8% on real-world robot tasks, substantially surpassing BadVLA (38.8% and 36.6%, respectively), while preserving clean-task performance comparable to standard models. These results uncover a critical threat: backdoors implanted before distribution can persist through fine-tuning and remain effective at deployment.

APEX: A Decoupled Memory-based Explorer for Asynchronous Aerial Object Goal Navigation

Aerial Object Goal Navigation, a challenging frontier in Embodied AI, requires an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) agent to autonomously explore, reason, and identify a specific target using only visual perception and language description. However, existing methods struggle with the memorization of complex spatial representations in aerial environments, reliable and interpretable action decision-making, and inefficient exploration and information gathering. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{APEX} (Aerial Parallel Explorer), a novel hierarchical agent designed for efficient exploration and target acquisition in complex aerial settings. APEX is built upon a modular, three-part architecture: 1) Dynamic Spatio-Semantic Mapping Memory, which leverages the zero-shot capability of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to dynamically construct high-resolution 3D Attraction, Exploration, and Obstacle maps, serving as an interpretable memory mechanism. 2) Action Decision Module, trained with reinforcement learning, which translates this rich spatial understanding into a fine-grained and robust control policy. 3) Target Grounding Module, which employs an open-vocabulary detector to achieve definitive and generalizable target identification. All these components are integrated into a hierarchical, asynchronous, and parallel framework, effectively bypassing the VLM's inference latency and boosting the agent's proactivity in exploration. Extensive experiments show that APEX outperforms the previous state of the art by +4.2\% SR and +2.8\% SPL on challenging UAV-ON benchmarks, demonstrating its superior efficiency and the effectiveness of its hierarchical asynchronous design. Our source code is provided in \href{https://github.com/4amGodvzx/apex}{GitHub}

Learning to Accelerate Vision-Language-Action Models through Adaptive Visual Token Caching

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks, yet their substantial computational overhead remains a critical obstacle to real-world deployment. Improving inference efficiency is therefore essential for practical robotic applications. Existing acceleration methods often rely on heuristic or static strategies--such as rule-based token caching or pruning--that are decoupled from task objectives and fail to adapt to dynamic scene changes. In this work, we reformulate inference acceleration as a learnable policy optimization problem and propose a novel framework that integrates a dynamic, task-aware decision-making process directly into the VLA model. At its core are two lightweight, cooperative modules: a Cached Token Selector, which determines which tokens should be reused, and a Cache Ratio Predictor, which controls how many tokens to reuse. Training these modules is non-trivial due to their discrete decisions. We address this by adopting a differentiable relaxation that allows gradient-based end-to-end optimization. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO and SIMPLER benchmarks, as well as real-robot evaluations, show that our method achieves a 1.76x wall-clock inference speedup while simultaneously improving the average success rate by 1.9 percentage points (from 75.0% to 76.9%) on LIBERO and by 5.0 percentage points on real-world tasks, significantly outperforming existing baselines. This work highlights the potential of learning task-aware computational allocation policies, paving the way for VLA models that are both powerful and efficient.