Advancing Ligand-based Virtual Screening and Molecular Generation with Pretrained Molecular Embedding Distance

Molecular similarity plays a central role in ligand-based drug discovery, such as virtual screening, analog searching, and goal-directed molecular generation. However, traditional similarity measures, ranging from fingerprint-based Tanimoto coefficients to 3D shape overlays, are often computationally expensive at scale or rely on hand-crafted molecular descriptors. Meanwhile, many deep learning approaches to similarity-aware design still depend on similarity-specific supervision or costly data curation, limiting their generality across targets. In this work, we propose pretrained embedding distance (PED) as an effective alternative, computed directly from pretrained molecular models without task-specific training. Experimental results show that PED exhibits distinct correlations with traditional similarity metrics, and performs effectively in both ranking molecules for virtual screening and guiding molecular generation via reward design. These findings suggest that pretrained molecular embeddings capture rich structural information and can serve as a promising and scalable similarity measurement for modern AI-aided drug discovery.

MMCORE: MultiModal COnnection with Representation Aligned Latent Embeddings

We present MMCORE, a unified framework designed for multimodal image generation and editing. MMCORE leverages a pre-trained Vision-Language Model (VLM) to predict semantic visual embeddings via learnable query tokens, which subsequently serve as conditioning signals for a diffusion model. This streamlined design effectively transfers the rich understanding and reasoning capabilities of VLMs into the visual generation process. By obviating the need for deep fusion between autoregressive and diffusion models or training from scratch, MMCORE significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining high-fidelity synthesis. MMCORE seamlessly integrates text-to-image synthesis with interleaved image generation, demonstrating robust multimodal comprehension in complex scenarios such as spatial reasoning and visual grounding. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that MMCORE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a broad spectrum of text-to-image and single/multi-image editing benchmarks.

Evolving the Complete Muscle: Efficient Morphology-Control Co-design for Musculoskeletal Locomotion

Musculoskeletal robots offer intrinsic compliance and flexibility, providing a promising paradigm for versatile locomotion. However, existing research typically relies on models with fixed muscle physiological parameters. This static physical setting fails to accommodate the diverse dynamic demands of complex tasks, inherently limiting the robot's performance upper bound. In this work, we focus on the morphology and control co-design of musculoskeletal systems. Unlike previous studies that optimize single physiological attributes such as stiffness, we introduce a Complete Musculoskeletal Morphological Evolution Space that simultaneously evolves muscle strength, velocity, and stiffness. To overcome the exponential expansion of the exploration space caused by this comprehensive evolution, we propose Spectral Design Evolution (SDE), a high-efficiency co-optimization framework. By integrating a bilateral symmetry prior with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), SDE projects complex muscle parameters onto a low-dimensional spectral manifold, enabling efficient morphological exploration. Evaluated on the MyoSuite framework across four tasks (Walk, Stair, Hilly, and Rough terrains), our method demonstrates superior learning efficiency and locomotion stability compared to fixed-morphology and standard evolutionary baselines.

EviRCOD: Evidence-Guided Probabilistic Decoding for Referring Camouflaged Object Detection

Referring Camouflaged Object Detection (Ref-COD) focuses on segmenting specific camouflaged targets in a query image using category-aligned references. Despite recent advances, existing methods struggle with reference-target semantic alignment, explicit uncertainty modeling, and robust boundary preservation. To address these issues, we propose EviRCOD, an integrated framework consisting of three core components: (1) a Reference-Guided Deformable Encoder (RGDE) that employs hierarchical reference-driven modulation and multi-scale deformable aggregation to inject semantic priors and align cross-scale representations; (2) an Uncertainty-Aware Evidential Decoder (UAED) that incorporates Dirichlet evidence estimation into hierarchical decoding to model uncertainty and propagate confidence across scales; and (3) a Boundary-Aware Refinement Module (BARM) that selectively enhances ambiguous boundaries by exploiting low-level edge cues and prediction confidence. Experiments on the Ref-COD benchmark demonstrate that EviRCOD achieves state-of-the-art detection performance while providing well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Code is available at: https://github.com/blueecoffee/EviRCOD.

Multi-Modal Building Change Detection for Large-Scale Small Changes: Benchmark and Baseline

Change detection in optical remote sensing imagery is susceptible to illumination fluctuations, seasonal changes, and variations in surface land-cover materials. Relying solely on RGB imagery often produces pseudo-changes and leads to semantic ambiguity in features. Incorporating near-infrared (NIR) information provides heterogeneous physical cues that are complementary to visible light, thereby enhancing the discriminability of building materials and tiny structures while improving detection accuracy. However, existing multi-modal datasets generally lack high-resolution and accurately registered bi-temporal imagery, and current methods often fail to fully exploit the inherent heterogeneity between these modalities. To address these issues, we introduce the Large-scale Small-change Multi-modal Dataset (LSMD), a bi-temporal RGB-NIR building change detection benchmark dataset targeting small changes in realistic scenarios, providing a rigorous testing platform for evaluating multi-modal change detection methods in complex environments. Based on LSMD, we further propose the Multi-modal Spectral Complementarity Network (MSCNet) to achieve effective cross-modal feature fusion. MSCNet comprises three key components: the Neighborhood Context Enhancement Module (NCEM) to strengthen local spatial details, the Cross-modal Alignment and Interaction Module (CAIM) to enable deep interaction between RGB and NIR features, and the Saliency-aware Multisource Refinement Module (SMRM) to progressively refine fused features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSCNet effectively leverages multi-modal information and consistently outperforms existing methods under multiple input configurations, validating its efficacy for fine-grained building change detection. The source code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/LSMD

Amplification Effects in Test-Time Reinforcement Learning: Safety and Reasoning Vulnerabilities

Test-time training (TTT) has recently emerged as a promising method to improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), in which the model directly learns from test data without access to labels. However, this reliance on test data also makes TTT methods vulnerable to harmful prompt injections. In this paper, we investigate safety vulnerabilities of TTT methods, where we study a representative self-consistency-based test-time learning method: test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL), a recent TTT method that improves LLM reasoning by rewarding self-consistency using majority vote as a reward signal. We show that harmful prompt injection during TTRL amplifies the model's existing behaviors, i.e., safety amplification when the base model is relatively safe, and harmfulness amplification when it is vulnerable to the injected data. In both cases, there is a decline in reasoning ability, which we refer to as the reasoning tax. We also show that TTT methods such as TTRL can be exploited adversarially using specially designed "HarmInject" prompts to force the model to answer jailbreak and reasoning queries together, resulting in stronger harmfulness amplification. Overall, our results highlight that TTT methods that enhance LLM reasoning by promoting self-consistency can lead to amplification behaviors and reasoning degradation, highlighting the need for safer TTT methods.

Mastering the Minority: An Uncertainty-guided Multi-Expert Framework for Challenging-tailed Sequence Learning

Imbalanced data distribution remains a critical challenge in sequential learning, leading models to easily recognize frequent categories while failing to detect minority classes adequately. The Mixture-of-Experts model offers a scalable solution, yet its application is often hindered by parameter inefficiency, poor expert specialization, and difficulty in resolving prediction conflicts. To Master the Minority classes effectively, we propose the Uncertainty-based Multi-Expert fusion network (UME) framework. UME is designed with three core innovations: First, we employ Ensemble LoRA for parameter-efficient modeling, significantly reducing the trainable parameter count. Second, we introduce Sequential Specialization guided by Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST), which ensures effective specialization on the challenging-tailed classes. Finally, an Uncertainty-Guided Fusion mechanism uses DST's certainty measures to dynamically weigh expert opinions, resolving conflicts by prioritizing the most confident expert for reliable final predictions. Extensive experiments across four public hierarchical text classification datasets demonstrate that UME achieves state-of-the-art performance. We achieve a performance gain of up to 17.97\% over the best baseline on individual categories, while reducing trainable parameters by up to 10.32\%. The findings highlight that uncertainty-guided expert coordination is a principled strategy for addressing challenging-tailed sequence learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/CQUPTWZX/Multi-experts.

Directional Embedding Smoothing for Robust Vision Language Models

The safety and reliability of vision-language models (VLMs) are a crucial part of deploying trustworthy agentic AI systems. However, VLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that undermine their safety alignment to yield harmful outputs. In this work, we extend the Randomized Embedding Smoothing and Token Aggregation (RESTA) defense to VLMs and evaluate its performance against the JailBreakV-28K benchmark of multi-modal jailbreaking attacks. We find that RESTA is effective in reducing attack success rate over this diverse corpus of attacks, in particular, when employing directional embedding noise, where the injected noise is aligned with the original token embedding vectors. Our results demonstrate that RESTA can contribute to securing VLMs within agentic systems, as a lightweight, inference-time defense layer of an overall security framework.

Hierarchical Decoding for Discrete Speech Synthesis with Multi-Resolution Spoof Detection

Neural codec language models enable high-quality discrete speech synthesis, yet their inference remains vulnerable to token-level artifacts and distributional drift that degrade perceptual realism. Rather than relying on preference optimization or retraining, we propose MSpoof-TTS, a training-free inference framework that improves zero-shot synthesis through multi-resolution spoof guidance. We introduce a Multi-Resolution Token-based Spoof Detection framework that evaluates codec sequences at different temporal granularities to detect locally inconsistent or unnatural patterns. We then integrate the spoof detectors into a hierarchical decoding strategy, progressively pruning low-quality candidates and re-ranking hypotheses. This discriminator-guided generation enhances robustness without modifying model parameters. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework for robust and high-quality codec-based speech generation.

CodecFlow: Efficient Bandwidth Extension via Conditional Flow Matching in Neural Codec Latent Space

Speech Bandwidth Extension improves clarity and intelligibility by restoring/inferring appropriate high-frequency content for low-bandwidth speech. Existing methods often rely on spectrogram or waveform modeling, which can incur higher computational cost and have limited high-frequency fidelity. Neural audio codecs offer compact latent representations that better preserve acoustic detail, yet accurately recovering high-resolution latent information remains challenging due to representation mismatch. We present CodecFlow, a neural codec-based BWE framework that performs efficient speech reconstruction in a compact latent space. CodecFlow employs a voicing-aware conditional flow converter on continuous codec embeddings and a structure-constrained residual vector quantizer to improve latent alignment stability. Optimized end-to-end, CodecFlow achieves strong spectral fidelity and enhanced perceptual quality on 8 kHz to 16 kHz and 44.1 kHz speech BWE tasks.