Let's Think with Images Efficiently! An Interleaved-Modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Framework with Dynamic and Precise Visual Thoughts

Recently, Interleaved-modal Chain-of-Thought (ICoT) reasoning has achieved remarkable success by leveraging both multimodal inputs and outputs, attracting increasing attention. While achieving promising performance, current ICoT methods still suffer from two major limitations: (1) Static Visual Thought Positioning, which statically inserts visual information at fixed steps, resulting in inefficient and inflexible reasoning; and (2) Broken Visual Thought Representation, which involves discontinuous and semantically incoherent visual tokens. To address these limitations, we introduce Interleaved-modal Chain-of-Thought reasoning with Dynamic and Precise Visual Thoughts (DaP-ICoT), which incorporates two key components: (1) Dynamic Visual Thought Integration adaptively introduces visual inputs based on reasoning needs, reducing redundancy and improving efficiency. (2) Precise Visual Thought Guidance ensures visual semantically coherent and contextually aligned representations. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models demonstrate that DaP-ICoT achieves state-of-the-art performance. In addition, DaP-ICoT significantly reduces the number of inserted images, leading to a 72.6% decrease in token consumption, enabling more efficient ICoT reasoning.

A Hybrid Knowledge-Grounded Framework for Safety and Traceability in Prescription Verification

Medication errors pose a significant threat to patient safety, making pharmacist verification (PV) a critical, yet heavily burdened, final safeguard. The direct application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to this zero-tolerance domain is untenable due to their inherent factual unreliability, lack of traceability, and weakness in complex reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce PharmGraph-Auditor, a novel system designed for safe and evidence-grounded prescription auditing. The core of our system is a trustworthy Hybrid Pharmaceutical Knowledge Base (HPKB), implemented under the Virtual Knowledge Graph (VKG) paradigm. This architecture strategically unifies a relational component for set constraint satisfaction and a graph component for topological reasoning via a rigorous mapping layer. To construct this HPKB, we propose the Iterative Schema Refinement (ISR) algorithm, a framework that enables the co-evolution of both graph and relational schemas from medical texts. For auditing, we introduce the KB-grounded Chain of Verification (CoV), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms the LLM from an unreliable generator into a transparent reasoning engine. CoV decomposes the audit task into a sequence of verifiable queries against the HPKB, generating hybrid query plans to retrieve evidence from the most appropriate data store. Experimental results demonstrate robust knowledge extraction capabilities and show promises of using PharmGraph-Auditor to enable pharmacists to achieve safer and faster prescription verification.

Denoising as Path Planning: Training-Free Acceleration of Diffusion Models with DPCache

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in image and video generation, yet their practical deployment remains hindered by the substantial computational overhead of multi-step iterative sampling. Among acceleration strategies, caching-based methods offer a training-free and effective solution by reusing or predicting features across timesteps. However, existing approaches rely on fixed or locally adaptive schedules without considering the global structure of the denoising trajectory, often leading to error accumulation and visual artifacts. To overcome this limitation, we propose DPCache, a novel training-free acceleration framework that formulates diffusion sampling acceleration as a global path planning problem. DPCache constructs a Path-Aware Cost Tensor from a small calibration set to quantify the path-dependent error of skipping timesteps conditioned on the preceding key timestep. Leveraging this tensor, DPCache employs dynamic programming to select an optimal sequence of key timesteps that minimizes the total path cost while preserving trajectory fidelity. During inference, the model performs full computations only at these key timesteps, while intermediate outputs are efficiently predicted using cached features. Extensive experiments on DiT, FLUX, and HunyuanVideo demonstrate that DPCache achieves strong acceleration with minimal quality loss, outperforming prior acceleration methods by $+$0.031 ImageReward at 4.87$\times$ speedup and even surpassing the full-step baseline by $+$0.028 ImageReward at 3.54$\times$ speedup on FLUX, validating the effectiveness of our path-aware global scheduling framework. Code will be released at https://github.com/argsss/DPCache.

Shape-morphing programming of soft materials on complex geometries via neural operator

Shape-morphing soft materials can enable diverse target morphologies through voxel-level material distribution design, offering significant potential for various applications. Despite progress in basic shape-morphing design with simple geometries, achieving advanced applications such as conformal implant deployment or aerodynamic morphing requires accurate and diverse morphing designs on complex geometries, which remains challenging. Here, we present a Spectral and Spatial Neural Operator (S2NO), which enables high-fidelity morphing prediction on complex geometries. S2NO effectively captures global and local morphing behaviours on irregular computational domains by integrating Laplacian eigenfunction encoding and spatial convolutions. Combining S2NO with evolutionary algorithms enables voxel-level optimisation of material distributions for shape morphing programming on various complex geometries, including irregular-boundary shapes, porous structures, and thin-walled structures. Furthermore, the neural operator's discretisation-invariant property enables super-resolution material distribution design, further expanding the diversity and complexity of morphing design. These advancements significantly improve the efficiency and capability of programming complex shape morphing.

Meta-Backscatter: Long-Distance Battery-Free Metamaterial-Backscatter Sensing and Communication

Battery-free Internet of Things (BF-IoT) enabled by backscatter communication is a rapidly evolving technology offering advantages of low cost, ultra-low power consumption, and robustness. However, the practical deployment of BF-IoT is significantly constrained by the limited communication range of common backscatter tags, which typically operate with a range of merely a few meters due to inherent round-trip path loss. Meta-backscatter systems that utilize metamaterial tags present a promising solution, retaining the inherent advantages of BF-IoT while breaking the critical communication range barrier. By leveraging densely paved sub-wavelength units to concentrate the reflected signal power, metamaterial tags enable a significant communication range extension over existing BF-IoT tags that employ omni-directional antennas. In this paper, we synthesize the principles and paradigms of metamaterial sensing to establish a unified design framework and a forward-looking research roadmap. Specifically, we first provide an overview of backscatter communication, encompassing its development history, working principles, and tag classification. We then introduce the design methodology for both metamaterial tags and their compatible transceivers. Moreover, we present the implementation of a meta-backscatter system prototype and report the experimental results based on it. Finally, we conclude by highlighting key challenges and outlining potential avenues for future research.

Learning Geometric Invariance for Gait Recognition

The goal of gait recognition is to extract identity-invariant features of an individual under various gait conditions, e.g., cross-view and cross-clothing. Most gait models strive to implicitly learn the common traits across different gait conditions in a data-driven manner to pull different gait conditions closer for recognition. However, relatively few studies have explicitly explored the inherent relations between different gait conditions. For this purpose, we attempt to establish connections among different gait conditions and propose a new perspective to achieve gait recognition: variations in different gait conditions can be approximately viewed as a combination of geometric transformations. In this case, all we need is to determine the types of geometric transformations and achieve geometric invariance, then identity invariance naturally follows. As an initial attempt, we explore three common geometric transformations (i.e., Reflect, Rotate, and Scale) and design a $\mathcal{R}$eflect-$\mathcal{R}$otate-$\mathcal{S}$cale invariance learning framework, named ${\mathcal{RRS}}$-Gait. Specifically, it first flexibly adjusts the convolution kernel based on the specific geometric transformations to achieve approximate feature equivariance. Then these three equivariant-aware features are respectively fed into a global pooling operation for final invariance-aware learning. Extensive experiments on four popular gait datasets (Gait3D, GREW, CCPG, SUSTech1K) show superior performance across various gait conditions.

IndoorUAV: Benchmarking Vision-Language UAV Navigation in Continuous Indoor Environments

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables agents to navigate in complex environments by following natural language instructions grounded in visual observations. Although most existing work has focused on ground-based robots or outdoor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), indoor UAV-based VLN remains underexplored, despite its relevance to real-world applications such as inspection, delivery, and search-and-rescue in confined spaces. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{IndoorUAV}, a novel benchmark and method specifically tailored for VLN with indoor UAVs. We begin by curating over 1,000 diverse and structurally rich 3D indoor scenes from the Habitat simulator. Within these environments, we simulate realistic UAV flight dynamics to collect diverse 3D navigation trajectories manually, further enriched through data augmentation techniques. Furthermore, we design an automated annotation pipeline to generate natural language instructions of varying granularity for each trajectory. This process yields over 16,000 high-quality trajectories, comprising the \textbf{IndoorUAV-VLN} subset, which focuses on long-horizon VLN. To support short-horizon planning, we segment long trajectories into sub-trajectories by selecting semantically salient keyframes and regenerating concise instructions, forming the \textbf{IndoorUAV-VLA} subset. Finally, we introduce \textbf{IndoorUAV-Agent}, a novel navigation model designed for our benchmark, leveraging task decomposition and multimodal reasoning. We hope IndoorUAV serves as a valuable resource to advance research on vision-language embodied AI in the indoor aerial navigation domain.

Semantic-Metric Bayesian Risk Fields: Learning Robot Safety from Human Videos with a VLM Prior

Humans interpret safety not as a binary signal but as a continuous, context- and spatially-dependent notion of risk. While risk is subjective, humans form rational mental models that guide action selection in dynamic environments. This work proposes a framework for extracting implicit human risk models by introducing a novel, semantically-conditioned and spatially-varying parametrization of risk, supervised directly from safe human demonstration videos and VLM common sense. Notably, we define risk through a Bayesian formulation. The prior is furnished by a pretrained vision-language model. In order to encourage the risk estimate to be more human aligned, a likelihood function modulates the prior to produce a relative metric of risk. Specifically, the likelihood is a learned ViT that maps pretrained features, to pixel-aligned risk values. Our pipeline ingests RGB images and a query object string, producing pixel-dense risk images. These images that can then be used as value-predictors in robot planning tasks or be projected into 3D for use in conventional trajectory optimization to produce human-like motion. This learned mapping enables generalization to novel objects and contexts, and has the potential to scale to much larger training datasets. In particular, the Bayesian framework that is introduced enables fast adaptation of our model to additional observations or common sense rules. We demonstrate that our proposed framework produces contextual risk that aligns with human preferences. Additionally, we illustrate several downstream applications of the model; as a value learner for visuomotor planners or in conjunction with a classical trajectory optimization algorithm. Our results suggest that our framework is a significant step toward enabling autonomous systems to internalize human-like risk. Code and results can be found at https://riskbayesian.github.io/bayesian_risk/.

A Closer Look at Knowledge Distillation in Spiking Neural Network Training

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) become popular due to excellent energy efficiency, yet facing challenges for effective model training. Recent works improve this by introducing knowledge distillation (KD) techniques, with the pre-trained artificial neural networks (ANNs) used as teachers and the target SNNs as students. This is commonly accomplished through a straightforward element-wise alignment of intermediate features and prediction logits from ANNs and SNNs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences between their architectures. Specifically, ANN's outputs exhibit a continuous distribution, whereas SNN's outputs are characterized by sparsity and discreteness. To mitigate this issue, we introduce two innovative KD strategies. Firstly, we propose the Saliency-scaled Activation Map Distillation (SAMD), which aligns the spike activation map of the student SNN with the class-aware activation map of the teacher ANN. Rather than performing KD directly on the raw %and distinct features of ANN and SNN, our SAMD directs the student to learn from saliency activation maps that exhibit greater semantic and distribution consistency. Additionally, we propose a Noise-smoothed Logits Distillation (NLD), which utilizes Gaussian noise to smooth the sparse logits of student SNN, facilitating the alignment with continuous logits from teacher ANN. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Code is available~\footnote{https://github.com/SinoLeu/CKDSNN.git}.

Moirai 2.0: When Less Is More for Time Series Forecasting

We introduce Moirai 2.0, a decoder-only time-series foundation model trained on a new corpus of 36M series. The model adopts quantile forecasting and multi-token prediction, improving both probabilistic accuracy and inference efficiency. On the Gift-Eval benchmark, it ranks among the top pretrained models while achieving a strong trade-off between accuracy, speed, and model size. Compared to Moirai 1.0, Moirai 2.0 replaces masked-encoder training, multi-patch inputs, and mixture-distribution outputs with a simpler decoder-only architecture, single patch, and quantile loss. Ablation studies isolate these changes -- showing that the decoder-only backbone along with recursive multi-quantile decoding contribute most to the gains. Additional experiments show that Moirai 2.0 outperforms larger models from the same family and exhibits robust domain-level results. In terms of efficiency and model size, Moirai 2.0 is twice as fast and thirty times smaller than its prior best version, Moirai 1.0-Large, while also performing better. Model performance plateaus with increasing parameter count and declines at longer horizons, motivating future work on data scaling and long-horizon modeling. We release code and evaluation details to support further research.