From Similarity to Structure: Training-free LLM Context Compression with Hybrid Graph Priors

Long-context large language models remain computationally expensive to run and often fail to reliably process very long inputs, which makes context compression an important component of many systems. Existing compression approaches typically rely on trained compressors, dense retrieval-style selection, or heuristic trimming, and they often struggle to jointly preserve task relevance, topic coverage, and cross-sentence coherence under a strict token budget. To address this, we propose a training-free and model-agnostic compression framework that selects a compact set of sentences guided by structural graph priors. Our method constructs a sparse hybrid sentence graph that combines mutual k-NN semantic edges with short-range sequential edges, extracts a topic skeleton via clustering, and ranks sentences using an interpretable score that integrates task relevance, cluster representativeness, bridge centrality, and a cycle coverage cue. A budgeted greedy selection with redundancy suppression then produces a readable compressed context in original order. Experimental results on four datasets show that our approach is competitive with strong extractive and abstractive baselines, demonstrating larger gains on long-document benchmarks.

Small Language Model Helps Resolve Semantic Ambiguity of LLM Prompt

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in various complex reasoning tasks due to their excellent instruction following capability. However, the model's performance is highly dependent on the open-ended characteristics of the users' input prompt. Natural prompts often do not follow proper syntactic rules, which creates ambiguous queries that yield multiple interpretations. Such ambiguous prompts confuse the model in choosing the correct reasoning paths to answer questions. Prior works address this challenge by applying query editing during the LLM inference process without explicitly solving the root cause of the ambiguity. To address this limitation, we propose a pre-inference prompt optimization mechanism via explicit prompt disambiguation. Particularly, we identify semantic risks in the prompt, check their multi-perspective consistency, and resolve any semantic conflicts that arise. Finally, we organize the resolved ambiguities in a logically structured manner as a clean input to the LLM. By explicitly resolving semantic ambiguity, our method can produce a more focused attention distribution to the semantically essential tokens. We also leverage small language models (SLMs) as the main executor of prompt disambiguation to benefit from their efficient computation. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that our method improves reasoning performance by 2.5 points at a cost of only \$0.02. Our study promotes explicit prompt disambiguation as an effective prompt optimization method without disturbing the internal mechanism of LLM inference.

RAT: RunAnyThing via Fully Automated Environment Configuration

Automating repository-level software engineering tasks is a foundational challenge for autonomous code agents, largely due to the difficulty of configuring executable environments. However, manual configuration remains a labor-intensive bottleneck, necessitating a transition toward fully automated environment configuration. Existing approaches often rely on pre-defined artifacts or are restricted to specific programming languages, limiting their applicability to real-world repositories. In this paper, we first propose RAT (RunAnyThing), a language-agnostic framework for automated environment configuration on arbitrary repositories. RAT features a multi-stage pipeline that integrates semantic initialization, a planning mechanism, specialized toolset, and a robust sandbox for configuration. Furthermore, to enable rigorous evaluation, we propose RATBench, a benchmark that reflects the the distribution and heterogeneity of real-world repositories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAT achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving the Environment Setup Success Rate (ESSR) by an average of 29.6% over strong baselines.

PhySE: A Psychological Framework for Real-Time AR-LLM Social Engineering Attacks

The emerging threat of AR-LLM-based Social Engineering (AR-LLM-SE) attacks (e.g. SEAR) poses a significant risk to real-world social interactions. In such an attack, a malicious actor uses Augmented Reality (AR) glasses to capture a target visual and vocal data. A Large Language Model (LLM) then analyzes this data to identify the individual and generate a detailed social profile. Subsequently, LLM-powered agents employ social engineering strategies, providing real-time conversation suggestions, to gain the target trust and ultimately execute phishing or other malicious acts. Despite its potential, the practical application of AR-LLM-SE faces two major bottlenecks, (1) Cold-start personalization, Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods introduce critical delays in the earliest turns, slowing initial profile formation and disrupting real-time interaction, (2) Static Attack Strategies, Existing approaches rely on fixed-stage, handcrafted social engineering tactics that lack foundation in established psychological theory. To address these limitations, we propose PhySE, a novel framework with two core innovations, (1) VLM-Based SocialContext Training, To eliminate profiling delays, we efficiently pre-train a Visual Language Model (VLM) with social-context data, enabling rapid, on-the-fly profile generation, (2) Adaptive Psychological Agent, We introduce a psychological LLM that dynamically deploys distinct classes of psychological strategies based on target response, moving beyond static, handcrafted scripts. We evaluated PhySE through an IRB-approved user study with 60 participants, collecting a novel dataset of 360 annotated conversations across diverse social scenarios.

UNSEEN: A Cross-Stack LLM Unlearning Defense against AR-LLM Social Engineering Attacks

Emerging AR-LLM-based Social Engineering attack (e.g., SEAR) is at the edge of posing great threats to real-world social life. In such AR-LLM-SE attack, the attacker can leverage AR (Augmented Reality) glass to capture the image and vocal information of the target, using the LLM to identify the target and generate the social profile, using the LLM agents to apply social engineering strategies for conversation suggestion to win the target trust and perform phishing afterwards. Current defensive approaches, such as role-based access control or data flow tracking, are not directly applicable to the convergent AR-LLM ecosystem (considering embedded AR device and opaque LLM inference), leaving an emerging and potent social engineering threat that existing privacy paradigms are ill-equipped to address. This necessitates a shift beyond solely human-centric measures like legislation and user education toward enforceable vendor policies and platform-level restrictions. Realizing this vision, however, faces significant technical challenges: securing resource-constrained AR-embedded devices, implementing fine-grained access control within opaque LLM inferences, and governing adaptive interactive agents. To address these challenges, we present UNSEEN, a coordinated cross-stack defense that combines an AR ACL (Access Control Layer) for identity-gated sensing, F-RMU-based LLM unlearning for sensitive profile suppression, and runtime agent guardrails for adaptive interaction control. We evaluate UNSEEN in an IRB-approved user study with 60 participants and a dataset of 360 annotated conversations across realistic social scenarios.

DASH-KV: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Asymmetric KV Cache Hashing

The quadratic computational complexity of the standard attention mechanism constitutes a fundamental bottleneck for large language models in long-context inference. While existing KV cache compression methods alleviate memory pressure, they often sacrifice generation quality and fail to address the high overhead of floating-point arithmetic. This paper introduces DASH-KV, an innovative acceleration framework that reformulates attention as approximate nearest-neighbor search via asymmetric deep hashing. Under this paradigm, we design an asymmetric encoding architecture that differentially maps queries and keys to account for their distinctions in precision and reuse characteristics. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we further introduce a dynamic mixed-precision mechanism that adaptively retains full-precision computation for critical tokens. Extensive experiments on LongBench demonstrate that DASH-KV significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods while matching the performance of full attention, all while reducing inference complexity from O(N^2) to linear O(N). The code is available at https://github.com/Zhihan-Zh/DASH-KV

SmartPhotoCrafter: Unified Reasoning, Generation and Optimization for Automatic Photographic Image Editing

Traditional photographic image editing typically requires users to possess sufficient aesthetic understanding to provide appropriate instructions for adjusting image quality and camera parameters. However, this paradigm relies on explicit human instruction of aesthetic intent, which is often ambiguous, incomplete, or inaccessible to non-expert users. In this work, we propose SmartPhotoCrafter, an automatic photographic image editing method which formulates image editing as a tightly coupled reasoning-to-generation process. The proposed model first performs image quality comprehension and identifies deficiencies by the Image Critic module, and then the Photographic Artist module realizes targeted edits to enhance image appeal, eliminating the need for explicit human instructions. A multi-stage training pipeline is adopted: (i) Foundation pretraining to establish basic aesthetic understanding and editing capabilities, (ii) Adaptation with reasoning-guided multi-edit supervision to incorporate rich semantic guidance, and (iii) Coordinated reasoning-to generation reinforcement learning to jointly optimize reasoning and generation. During training, SmartPhotoCrafter emphasizes photo-realistic image generation, while supporting both image restoration and retouching tasks with consistent adherence to color- and tone-related semantics. We also construct a stage-specific dataset, which progressively builds reasoning and controllable generation, effective cross-module collaboration, and ultimately high-quality photographic enhancement. Experiments demonstrate that SmartPhotoCrafter outperforms existing generative models on the task of automatic photographic enhancement, achieving photo-realistic results while exhibiting higher tonal sensitivity to retouching instructions. Project page: https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/SmartPhotoCrafter.

QuantumQA: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Physics-Consistent Dataset and Verification-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) show strong capabilities in general reasoning but typically lack reliability in scientific domains like quantum mechanics, which demand strict adherence to physical constraints. This limitation arises from the scarcity of verifiable training resources and the inadequacy of coarse feedback signals in standard alignment paradigms. To address the data challenge, we introduce QuantumQA, a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor. Building on this foundation, we propose the verification-aware reward model (VRM) tailored for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which employs an adaptive reward fusion (ARF) mechanism to dynamically integrate deterministic signals from a scientific execution suite (SES) with multidimensional semantic evaluations for precise supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models. Notably, our optimized 8B model achieves performance competitive with proprietary models, validating that incorporating verifiable, rule-based feedback into the reinforcement learning loop offers a parameter-efficient alternative to pure scaling.

Transforming External Knowledge into Triplets for Enhanced Retrieval in RAG of LLMs

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge during generation. However, the effectiveness of RAG depends not only on the design of the retriever and the capacity of the underlying model, but also on how retrieved evidence is structured and aligned with the query. Existing RAG approaches typically retrieve and concatenate unstructured text fragments as context, which often introduces redundant or weakly relevant information. This practice leads to excessive context accumulation, reduced semantic alignment, and fragmented reasoning chains, thereby degrading generation quality while increasing token consumption. To address these challenges, we propose Tri-RAG, a structured triplet-based retrieval framework that improves retrieval efficiency through reasoning-aligned context construction. Tri-RAG automatically transforms external knowledge from natural language into standardized structured triplets consisting of Condition, Proof, and Conclusion, explicitly capturing logical relations among knowledge fragments using lightweight prompt-based adaptation with frozen model parameters. Building on this representation, the triplet head Condition is treated as an explicit semantic anchor for retrieval and matching, enabling precise identification of query-relevant knowledge units without directly concatenating lengthy raw texts. As a result, Tri-RAG achieves a favorable balance between retrieval accuracy and context token efficiency. Experimental results across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Tri-RAG significantly improves retrieval quality and reasoning efficiency, while producing more stable generation behavior and more efficient resource utilization in complex reasoning scenarios.

The Second Challenge on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) remains a challenging problem for existing object detectors and few-shot learning approaches, particularly when generalizing across distinct domains. As part of NTIRE 2026, we hosted the second CD-FSOD Challenge to systematically evaluate and promote progress in detecting objects in unseen target domains under limited annotation conditions. The challenge received strong community interest, with 128 registered participants and a total of 696 submissions. Among them, 31 teams actively participated, and 19 teams submitted valid final results. Participants explored a wide range of strategies, introducing innovative methods that push the performance frontier under both open-source and closed-source tracks. This report presents a detailed overview of the NTIRE 2026 CD-FSOD Challenge, including a summary of the submitted approaches and an analysis of the final results across all participating teams. Challenge Codes: https://github.com/ohMargin/NTIRE2026_CDFSOD.