EKPC: Elastic Knowledge Preservation and Compensation for Class-Incremental Learning

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to enable AI models to continuously learn from sequentially arriving data of different classes over time while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, like prompt pool-based approaches and adapter tuning, have shown great attraction in CIL. However, these methods either introduce additional parameters that increase memory usage, or rely on rigid regularization techniques which reduce forgetting but compromise model flexibility. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Elastic Knowledge Preservation and Compensation (EKPC) method, integrating Importance-aware Parameter Regularization (IPR) and Trainable Semantic Drift Compensation (TSDC) for CIL. Specifically, the IPR method assesses the sensitivity of network parameters to prior tasks using a novel parameter-importance algorithm. It then selectively constrains updates within the shared adapter according to these importance values, thereby preserving previously acquired knowledge while maintaining the model's flexibility. However, it still exhibits slight semantic differences in previous knowledge to accommodate new incremental tasks, leading to decision boundaries confusion in classifier. To eliminate this confusion, TSDC trains a unified classifier by compensating prototypes with trainable semantic drift. Extensive experiments on five CIL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing superior performances to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Robust Transceiver Design for RIS Enhanced Dual-Functional Radar-Communication with Movable Antenna

Movable antennas (MAs) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing the performance of dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems. In this paper, we explore an MA-aided DFRC system that utilizes a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to enhance signal coverage for communications in dead zones. To enhance the radar sensing performance in practical DFRC environments, we propose a unified robust transceiver design framework aimed at maximizing the minimum radar signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in a cluttered environment. Our approach jointly optimizes transmit beamforming, receive filtering, antenna placement, and RIS reflecting coefficients under imperfect channel state information (CSI) for both sensing and communication channels. To deal with the channel uncertainty-constrained issue, we leverage the convex hull method to transform the primal problem into a more tractable form. We then introduce a two-layer block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm, incorporating fractional programming (FP), successive convex approximation (SCA), S-Lemma, and penalty techniques to reformulate it into a series of semidefinite program (SDP) subproblems that can be efficiently solved. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the convergence and computational complexity for the proposed design framework. Simulation results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method, and show that the MA-based design framework can significantly enhance the radar SINR performance while achieving an effective balance between the radar and communication performance.

When Semantics Mislead Vision: Mitigating Large Multimodal Models Hallucinations in Scene Text Spotting and Understanding

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved impressive progress in visual perception and reasoning. However, when confronted with visually ambiguous or non-semantic scene text, they often struggle to accurately spot and understand the content, frequently generating semantically plausible yet visually incorrect answers, which we refer to as semantic hallucination. In this work, we investigate the underlying causes of semantic hallucination and identify a key finding: Transformer layers in LLM with stronger attention focus on scene text regions are less prone to producing semantic hallucinations. Thus, we propose a training-free semantic hallucination mitigation framework comprising two key components: (1) ZoomText, a coarse-to-fine strategy that identifies potential text regions without external detectors; and (2) Grounded Layer Correction, which adaptively leverages the internal representations from layers less prone to hallucination to guide decoding, correcting hallucinated outputs for non-semantic samples while preserving the semantics of meaningful ones. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce TextHalu-Bench, a benchmark of over 1,730 samples spanning both semantic and non-semantic cases, with manually curated question-answer pairs designed to probe model hallucinations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only effectively mitigates semantic hallucination but also achieves strong performance on public benchmarks for scene text spotting and understanding.

SCOUT: Teaching Pre-trained Language Models to Enhance Reasoning via Flow Chain-of-Thought

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by encouraging step by step thinking. However, CoT-based methods depend on intermediate reasoning steps, which limits scalability and generalization. Recent work explores recursive reasoning, where LLMs reuse internal layers across iterations to refine latent representations without explicit CoT supervision. While promising, these approaches often require costly pretraining and lack a principled framework for how reasoning should evolve across iterations. We address this gap by introducing Flow Chain of Thought (Flow CoT), a reasoning paradigm that models recursive inference as a progressive trajectory of latent cognitive states. Flow CoT frames each iteration as a distinct cognitive stage deepening reasoning across iterations without relying on manual supervision. To realize this, we propose SCOUT (Stepwise Cognitive Optimization Using Teachers), a lightweight fine tuning framework that enables Flow CoT style reasoning without the need for pretraining. SCOUT uses progressive distillation to align each iteration with a teacher of appropriate capacity, and a cross attention based retrospective module that integrates outputs from previous iterations while preserving the models original computation flow. Experiments across eight reasoning benchmarks show that SCOUT consistently improves both accuracy and explanation quality, achieving up to 1.8% gains under fine tuning. Qualitative analyses further reveal that SCOUT enables progressively deeper reasoning across iterations refining both belief formation and explanation granularity. These results not only validate the effectiveness of SCOUT, but also demonstrate the practical viability of Flow CoT as a scalable framework for enhancing reasoning in LLMs.

Learning Adaptive and Temporally Causal Video Tokenization in a 1D Latent Space

We propose AdapTok, an adaptive temporal causal video tokenizer that can flexibly allocate tokens for different frames based on video content. AdapTok is equipped with a block-wise masking strategy that randomly drops tail tokens of each block during training, and a block causal scorer to predict the reconstruction quality of video frames using different numbers of tokens. During inference, an adaptive token allocation strategy based on integer linear programming is further proposed to adjust token usage given predicted scores. Such design allows for sample-wise, content-aware, and temporally dynamic token allocation under a controllable overall budget. Extensive experiments for video reconstruction and generation on UCF-101 and Kinetics-600 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Without additional image data, AdapTok consistently improves reconstruction quality and generation performance under different token budgets, allowing for more scalable and token-efficient generative video modeling.

Tianyi: A Traditional Chinese Medicine all-rounder language model and its Real-World Clinical Practice

Natural medicines, particularly Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), are gaining global recognition for their therapeutic potential in addressing human symptoms and diseases. TCM, with its systematic theories and extensive practical experience, provides abundant resources for healthcare. However, the effective application of TCM requires precise syndrome diagnosis, determination of treatment principles, and prescription formulation, which demand decades of clinical expertise. Despite advancements in TCM-based decision systems, machine learning, and deep learning research, limitations in data and single-objective constraints hinder their practical application. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in complex tasks, but lack specialization in TCM and face significant challenges, such as too big model scale to deploy and issues with hallucination. To address these challenges, we introduce Tianyi with 7.6-billion-parameter LLM, a model scale proper and specifically designed for TCM, pre-trained and fine-tuned on diverse TCM corpora, including classical texts, expert treatises, clinical records, and knowledge graphs. Tianyi is designed to assimilate interconnected and systematic TCM knowledge through a progressive learning manner. Additionally, we establish TCMEval, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, to assess LLMs in TCM examinations, clinical tasks, domain-specific question-answering, and real-world trials. The extensive evaluations demonstrate the significant potential of Tianyi as an AI assistant in TCM clinical practice and research, bridging the gap between TCM knowledge and practical application.

ESDiff: Encoding Strategy-inspired Diffusion Model with Few-shot Learning for Color Image Inpainting

Image inpainting is a technique used to restore missing or damaged regions of an image. Traditional methods primarily utilize information from adjacent pixels for reconstructing missing areas, while they struggle to preserve complex details and structures. Simultaneously, models based on deep learning necessitate substantial amounts of training data. To address this challenge, an encoding strategy-inspired diffusion model with few-shot learning for color image inpainting is proposed in this paper. The main idea of this novel encoding strategy is the deployment of a "virtual mask" to construct high-dimensional objects through mutual perturbations between channels. This approach enables the diffusion model to capture diverse image representations and detailed features from limited training samples. Moreover, the encoding strategy leverages redundancy between channels, integrates with low-rank methods during iterative inpainting, and incorporates the diffusion model to achieve accurate information output. Experimental results indicate that our method exceeds current techniques in quantitative metrics, and the reconstructed images quality has been improved in aspects of texture and structural integrity, leading to more precise and coherent results.

Cream of the Crop: Harvesting Rich, Scalable and Transferable Multi-Modal Data for Instruction Fine-Tuning

The hypothesis that pretrained large language models (LLMs) necessitate only minimal supervision during the fine-tuning (SFT) stage (Zhou et al., 2024) has been substantiated by recent advancements in data curation and selection research. However, their stability and generalizability are compromised due to the vulnerability to experimental setups and validation protocols, falling short of surpassing random sampling (Diddee & Ippolito, 2024; Xia et al., 2024b). Built upon LLMs, multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs), combined with the sheer token volume and heightened heterogeneity of data sources, amplify both the significance and complexity of data selection. To harvest multi-modal instructional data in a robust and efficient manner, we re-define the granularity of the quality metric by decomposing it into 14 vision-language-related capabilities, and introduce multi-modal rich scorers to evaluate the capabilities of each data candidate. To promote diversity, in light of the inherent objective of the alignment stage, we take interaction style as diversity indicator and use a multi-modal rich styler to identify data instruction patterns. In doing so, our multi-modal rich scorers and styler (mmSSR) guarantee that high-scoring information is conveyed to users in diversified forms. Free from embedding-based clustering or greedy sampling, mmSSR efficiently scales to millions of data with varying budget constraints, supports customization for general or specific capability acquisition, and facilitates training-free generalization to new domains for curation. Across 10+ experimental settings, validated by 14 multi-modal benchmarks, we demonstrate consistent improvements over random sampling, baseline strategies and state-of-the-art selection methods, achieving 99.1% of full performance with only 30% of the 2.6M data.

Physics-based machine learning framework for predicting NOx emissions from compression ignition engines using on-board diagnostics data

This work presents a physics-based machine learning framework to predict and analyze oxides of nitrogen (NOx) emissions from compression-ignition engine-powered vehicles using on-board diagnostics (OBD) data as input. Accurate NOx prediction from OBD datasets is difficult because NOx formation inside an engine combustion chamber is governed by complex processes occurring on timescales much shorter than the data collection rate. Thus, emissions generally cannot be predicted accurately using simple empirically derived physics models. Black box models like genetic algorithms or neural networks can be more accurate, but have poor interpretability. The transparent model presented in this paper has both high accuracy and can explain potential sources of high emissions. The proposed framework consists of two major steps: a physics-based NOx prediction model combined with a novel Divergent Window Co-occurrence (DWC) Pattern detection algorithm to analyze operating conditions that are not adequately addressed by the physics-based model. The proposed framework is validated for generalizability with a second vehicle OBD dataset, a sensitivity analysis is performed, and model predictions are compared with that from a deep neural network. The results show that NOx emissions predictions using the proposed model has around 55% better root mean square error, and around 60% higher mean absolute error compared to the baseline NOx prediction model from previously published work. The DWC Pattern Detection Algorithm identified low engine power conditions to have high statistical significance, indicating an operating regime where the model can be improved. This work shows that the physics-based machine learning framework is a viable method for predicting NOx emissions from engines that do not incorporate NOx sensing.

Speculative MoE: Communication Efficient Parallel MoE Inference with Speculative Token and Expert Pre-scheduling

MoE (Mixture of Experts) prevails as a neural architecture that can scale modern transformer-based LLMs (Large Language Models) to unprecedented scales. Nevertheless, large MoEs' great demands of computing power, memory capacity and memory bandwidth make scalable serving a fundamental challenge and efficient parallel inference has become a requisite to attain adequate throughput under latency constraints. DeepSpeed-MoE, one state-of-the-art MoE inference framework, adopts a 3D-parallel paradigm including EP (Expert Parallelism), TP (Tensor Parallel) and DP (Data Parallelism). However, our analysis shows DeepSpeed-MoE's inference efficiency is largely bottlenecked by EP, which is implemented with costly all-to-all collectives to route token activation. Our work aims to boost DeepSpeed-MoE by strategically reducing EP's communication overhead with a technique named Speculative MoE. Speculative MoE has two speculative parallelization schemes, speculative token shuffling and speculative expert grouping, which predict outstanding tokens' expert routing paths and pre-schedule tokens and experts across devices to losslessly trim EP's communication volume. Besides DeepSpeed-MoE, we also build Speculative MoE into a prevailing MoE inference engine SGLang. Experiments show Speculative MoE can significantly boost state-of-the-art MoE inference frameworks on fast homogeneous and slow heterogeneous interconnects.