FAVE: Flow-based Average Velocity Establishment for Sequential Recommendation

Generative recommendation has emerged as a transformative paradigm for capturing the dynamic evolution of user intents in sequential recommendation. While flow-based methods improve the efficiency of diffusion models, they remain hindered by the ``Noise-to-Data'' paradigm, which introduces two critical inefficiencies: prior mismatch, where generation starts from uninformative noise, forcing a lengthy recovery trajectory; and linear redundancy, where iterative solvers waste computation on modeling deterministic preference transitions. To address these limitations, we propose a Flow-based Average Velocity Establishment (Fave) framework for one-step generation recommendation that learns a direct trajectory from an informative prior to the target distribution. Fave is structured via a progressive two-stage training strategy. In Stage 1, we establish a stable preference space through dual-end semantic alignment, applying constraints at both the source (user history) and target (next item) to prevent representation collapse. In Stage 2, we directly resolve the efficiency bottlenecks by introducing a semantic anchor prior, which initializes the flow with a masked embedding from the user's interaction history, providing an informative starting point. Then we learn a global average velocity, consolidating the multi-step trajectory into a single displacement vector, and enforce trajectory straightness via a JVP-based consistency constraint to ensure one-step generation. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that Fave not only achieves state-of-the-art recommendation performance but also delivers an order-of-magnitude improvement in inference efficiency, making it practical for latency-sensitive scenarios.

Benchmarking and Mechanistic Analysis of Vision-Language Models for Cross-Depiction Assembly Instruction Alignment

2D assembly diagrams are often abstract and hard to follow, creating a need for intelligent assistants that can monitor progress, detect errors, and provide step-by-step guidance. In mixed reality settings, such systems must recognize completed and ongoing steps from the camera feed and align them with the diagram instructions. Vision Language Models (VLMs) show promise for this task, but face a depiction gap because assembly diagrams and video frames share few visual features. To systematically assess this gap, we construct IKEA-Bench, a benchmark of 1,623 questions across 6 task types on 29 IKEA furniture products, and evaluate 19 VLMs (2B-38B) under three alignment strategies. Our key findings: (1) assembly instruction understanding is recoverable via text, but text simultaneously degrades diagram-to-video alignment; (2) architecture family predicts alignment accuracy more strongly than parameter count; (3) video understanding remains a hard bottleneck unaffected by strategy. A three-level mechanistic analysis further reveals that diagrams and video occupy disjoint ViT subspaces, and that adding text shifts models from visual to text-driven reasoning. These results identify visual encoding as the primary target for improving cross-depiction robustness. Project page: https://ryenhails.github.io/IKEA-Bench/

NanoVDR: Distilling a 2B Vision-Language Retriever into a 70M Text-Only Encoder for Visual Document Retrieval

Vision-Language Model (VLM) based retrievers have advanced visual document retrieval (VDR) to impressive quality. They require the same multi-billion parameter encoder for both document indexing and query encoding, incurring high latency and GPU dependence even for plain-text queries. We observe that this design is unnecessarily symmetric: documents are visually complex and demand strong visual understanding, whereas queries are just short text strings. NanoVDR exploits this query--document asymmetry by decoupling the two encoding paths: a frozen 2B VLM teacher indexes documents offline, while a distilled text-only student as small as 69M parameters encodes queries at inference. The key design choice is the distillation objective. Through systematic comparison of six objectives across three backbones and 22 ViDoRe benchmark datasets, we find that pointwise cosine alignment on query text consistently outperforms ranking-based and contrastive alternatives, while requiring only pre-cached teacher query embeddings and no document processing during training. Furthermore, we identify cross-lingual transfer as the primary performance bottleneck, and resolve it cheaply by augmenting training data with machine-translated queries. The resulting NanoVDR-S-Multi (DistilBERT, 69M) retains 95.1\% of teacher quality and outperforms DSE-Qwen2 (2B) on v2 and v3 with 32$\times$ fewer parameters and 50$\times$ lower CPU query latency, at a total training cost under 13 GPU-hours.

LingoMotion: An Interpretable and Unambiguous Symbolic Representation for Human Motion

Existing representations for human motion, such as MotionGPT, often operate as black-box latent vectors with limited interpretability and build on joint positions which can cause ambiguity. Inspired by the hierarchical structure of natural languages - from letters to words, phrases, and sentences - we propose LingoMotion, a motion language that facilitates interpretable and unambiguous symbolic representation for both simple and complex human motion. In this paper, we introduce the concept design of LingoMotion, including the definitions of motion alphabet based on joint angles, the morphology for forming words and phrases to describe simple actions like walking and their attributes like speed and scale, as well as the syntax for describing more complex human activities with sequences of words and phrases. The preliminary results, including the implementation and evaluation of motion alphabet using a large-scale motion dataset Motion-X, demonstrate the high fidelity of motion representation.

Fine-grained Motion Retrieval via Joint-Angle Motion Images and Token-Patch Late Interaction

Text-motion retrieval aims to learn a semantically aligned latent space between natural language descriptions and 3D human motion skeleton sequences, enabling bidirectional search across the two modalities. Most existing methods use a dual-encoder framework that compresses motion and text into global embeddings, discarding fine-grained local correspondences, and thus reducing accuracy. Additionally, these global-embedding methods offer limited interpretability of the retrieval results. To overcome these limitations, we propose an interpretable, joint-angle-based motion representation that maps joint-level local features into a structured pseudo-image, compatible with pre-trained Vision Transformers. For text-to-motion retrieval, we employ MaxSim, a token-wise late interaction mechanism, and enhance it with Masked Language Modeling regularization to foster robust, interpretable text-motion alignment. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art text-motion retrieval approaches while offering interpretable fine-grained correspondences between text and motion. The code is available in the supplementary material.

DynaTrust: Defending Multi-Agent Systems Against Sleeper Agents via Dynamic Trust Graphs

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable collaborative reasoning capabilities but introduce new attack surfaces, such as the sleeper agent, which behave benignly during routine operation and gradually accumulate trust, only revealing malicious behaviors when specific conditions or triggers are met. Existing defense works primarily focus on static graph optimization or hierarchical data management, often failing to adapt to evolving adversarial strategies or suffering from high false-positive rates (FPR) due to rigid blocking policies. To address this, we propose DynaTrust, a novel defense method against sleeper agents. DynaTrust models MAS as a dynamic trust graph~(DTG), and treats trust as a continuous, evolving process rather than a static attribute. It dynamically updates the trust of each agent based on its historical behaviors and the confidence of selected expert agents. Instead of simply blocking, DynaTrust autonomously restructures the graph to isolate compromised agents and restore task connectivity to ensure the usability of MAS. To assess the effectiveness of DynaTrust, we evaluate it on mixed benchmarks derived from AdvBench and HumanEval. The results demonstrate that DynaTrust outperforms the state-of-the-art method AgentShield by increasing the defense success rate by 41.7%, achieving rates exceeding 86% under adversarial conditions. Furthermore, it effectively balances security with utility by significantly reducing FPR, ensuring uninterrupted system operations through graph adaptation.

Detecting Fake Reviewer Groups in Dynamic Networks: An Adaptive Graph Learning Method

The proliferation of fake reviews, often produced by organized groups, undermines consumer trust and fair competition on online platforms. These groups employ sophisticated strategies that evade traditional detection methods, particularly in cold-start scenarios involving newly launched products with sparse data. To address this, we propose the \underline{D}iversity- and \underline{S}imilarity-aware \underline{D}ynamic \underline{G}raph \underline{A}ttention-enhanced \underline{G}raph \underline{C}onvolutional \underline{N}etwork (DS-DGA-GCN), a new graph learning model for detecting fake reviewer groups. DS-DGA-GCN achieves robust detection since it focuses on the joint relationships among products, reviews, and reviewers by modeling product-review-reviewer networks. DS-DGA-GCN also achieves adaptive detection by integrating a Network Feature Scoring (NFS) system and a new dynamic graph attention mechanism. The NFS system quantifies network attributes, including neighbor diversity, network self-similarity, as a unified feature score. The dynamic graph attention mechanism improves the adaptability and computational efficiency by captures features related to temporal information, node importance, and global network structure. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets derived from Amazon and Xiaohongshu demonstrate that DS-DGA-GCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving accuracies of up to \textbf{89.8\% and 88.3\%}, respectively.

OptiLeak: Efficient Prompt Reconstruction via Reinforcement Learning in Multi-tenant LLM Services

Multi-tenant LLM serving frameworks widely adopt shared Key-Value caches to enhance efficiency. However, this creates side-channel vulnerabilities enabling prompt leakage attacks. Prior studies identified these attack surfaces yet focused on expanding attack vectors rather than optimizing attack performance, reporting impractically high attack costs that underestimate the true privacy risk. We propose OptiLeak, a reinforcement learning-enhanced framework that maximizes prompt reconstruction efficiency through two-stage fine-tuning. Our key insight is that domain-specific ``hard tokens'' -- terms difficult to predict yet carrying sensitive information -- can be automatically identified via likelihood ranking and used to construct preference pairs for Direct Preference Optimization, eliminating manual annotation. This enables effective preference alignment while avoiding the overfitting issues of extended supervised fine-tuning. Evaluated on three benchmarks spanning medical and financial domains, OptiLeak achieves up to $12.48\times$ reduction in average requests per token compared to baseline approaches, with consistent improvements across model scales from 3B to 14B parameters. Our findings demonstrate that cache-based prompt leakage poses a more severe threat than previously reported, underscoring the need for robust cache isolation in production deployments.

Deep-Learning-Based Control of a Decoupled Two-Segment Continuum Robot for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Manual endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) is technically demanding, and existing single-segment robotic tools offer limited dexterity. These limitations motivate the development of more advanced solutions. To address this, DESectBot, a novel dual segment continuum robot with a decoupled structure and integrated surgical forceps, enabling 6 degrees of freedom (DoFs) tip dexterity for improved lesion targeting in ESD, was developed in this work. Deep learning controllers based on gated recurrent units (GRUs) for simultaneous tip position and orientation control, effectively handling the nonlinear coupling between continuum segments, were proposed. The GRU controller was benchmarked against Jacobian based inverse kinematics, model predictive control (MPC), a feedforward neural network (FNN), and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. In nested-rectangle and Lissajous trajectory tracking tasks, the GRU achieved the lowest position/orientation RMSEs: 1.11 mm/ 4.62° and 0.81 mm/ 2.59°, respectively. For orientation control at a fixed position (four target poses), the GRU attained a mean RMSE of 0.14 mm and 0.72°, outperforming all alternatives. In a peg transfer task, the GRU achieved a 100% success rate (120 success/120 attempts) with an average transfer time of 11.8s, the STD significantly outperforms novice-controlled systems. Additionally, an ex vivo ESD demonstration grasping, elevating, and resecting tissue as the scalpel completed the cut confirmed that DESectBot provides sufficient stiffness to divide thick gastric mucosa and an operative workspace adequate for large lesions.These results confirm that GRU-based control significantly enhances precision, reliability, and usability in ESD surgical training scenarios.

AgroFlux: A Spatial-Temporal Benchmark for Carbon and Nitrogen Flux Prediction in Agricultural Ecosystems

Agroecosystem, which heavily influenced by human actions and accounts for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), plays a crucial role in mitigating global climate change and securing environmental sustainability. However, we can't manage what we can't measure. Accurately quantifying the pools and fluxes in the carbon, nutrient, and water nexus of the agroecosystem is therefore essential for understanding the underlying drivers of GHG and developing effective mitigation strategies. Conventional approaches like soil sampling, process-based models, and black-box machine learning models are facing challenges such as data sparsity, high spatiotemporal heterogeneity, and complex subsurface biogeochemical and physical processes. Developing new trustworthy approaches such as AI-empowered models, will require the AI-ready benchmark dataset and outlined protocols, which unfortunately do not exist. In this work, we introduce a first-of-its-kind spatial-temporal agroecosystem GHG benchmark dataset that integrates physics-based model simulations from Ecosys and DayCent with real-world observations from eddy covariance flux towers and controlled-environment facilities. We evaluate the performance of various sequential deep learning models on carbon and nitrogen flux prediction, including LSTM-based models, temporal CNN-based model, and Transformer-based models. Furthermore, we explored transfer learning to leverage simulated data to improve the generalization of deep learning models on real-world observations. Our benchmark dataset and evaluation framework contribute to the development of more accurate and scalable AI-driven agroecosystem models, advancing our understanding of ecosystem-climate interactions.