Abstract:Large-scale recommendation systems operate across diverse domains, yet they face the challenges of data sparsity and noisy implicit feedback. Traditional approaches mitigate this via model-specific knowledge distillation from source domains to a target domain. Inspired by the transformative success of synthetic data generation in large language models (LLMs), we introduce Synthetic Cross-domain Augmentation and Learning for Recommendation (SCALR), a framework that generates synthetic user-item interaction events for a target recommendation domain by leveraging observed events from a source domain. SCALR decomposes cross-domain learning into two modular stages. First, it translates observed user events in source domains by framing event generation as estimating the likelihood that a user would interact with a target-domain item, conditioned on their observed interactions in a source domain. Second, downstream models train on these synthetic events as cross-domain learning objectives, where the synthetic events augment the target domain's training data in a model-agnostic manner. Our approach yields statistically significant improvements in online A/B tests on an industrial recommendation platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to explicitly frame cross-domain event transfer as synthetic data generation for recommendation systems.
Abstract:Large language model (LLM) serving creates environmental impacts beyond carbon and water, including ecosystem damage through biodiversity-related pathways. We present BIRDS, a framework for Biodiversity Impact of Request-Driven LLM Serving. BIRDS defines request-level functional units, quantifies operational and embodied biodiversity impact, and introduces Quality-Normalized Biodiversity Impact (QNBI) to jointly analyze ecological impact and response quality. Across diverse workloads, models, GPUs, and regions, BIRDS reveals that biodiversity impact accumulates at scale and exposes actionable quality-aware serving tradeoffs.
Abstract:Effective multi-agent systems cannot be designed by selecting prompts or communication graphs in isolation. Agent behavior depends on the information an agent receives, while the usefulness of a communication edge depends on how the receiving agent interprets and uses that information. We propose \textbf{TCP-MCP} (Topology-Coupled Prompting for Multi-Agent Collaborative Problem-Solving), a co-evolution framework that searches agent prompts and communication topologies as a unified genome. TCP-MCP uses an initialization-time landscape probe to calibrate early search behavior, and then relies on Pareto-front diagnostics to adapt exploration under three objectives: task performance, token cost, and structural complexity. Using the same DeepSeek-V3.2 backbone across all methods, TCP-MCP achieves 82.66\%, 89.96\%, and 96.61\% accuracy on MMLU-Pro, MMLU, and GSM8K, respectively. Across the three benchmarks, it consistently outperforms automated graph-generation baselines and achieves competitive accuracy relative to debate-style systems, while using up to 5.69$\times$ fewer tokens than those systems at the reported operating points. These results show that jointly evolving prompts and communication structure provides a practical route to cost-aware and task-adaptive multi-agent system design in controlled evaluations.
Abstract:State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as a powerful and efficient alternative to Transformers, demonstrating linear-time complexity and exceptional sequence modeling capabilities. However, their application to vision tasks remains challenging. First, existing vision SSMs largely depend on manually designed fixed scanning methods to flatten image patches into sequences, which imposes predefined geometric structures and increases the complexity. Second, the broader adoption of vision SSMs is hindered in domains that require query-based interactions between distinct information streams. This is a result of the inherently causal and self-referential nature of SSMs designed for 1D sequence modeling tasks. This fusion mechanism is indispensable for critical perception tasks such as multi-view 3D fusion. To address these limitations, we propose Deformba, a context adaptive method that dynamically augments the spatial structural information while maintaining the linear complexity of SSMs. Deformba also allows multi-modal fusion like cross attention. To demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of Deformba, we test its performance on general 2D vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation, as well as 3D vision tasks like BEV perception. Extensive experiments show that Deformba achieves strong performance across various visual perception benchmarks.
Abstract:EEG foundation models (FMs) achieve strong cross-subject and cross-task generalization but impose substantial computational and memory costs that hinder deployment on embedded BCI systems. Knowledge distillation is a natural solution; however, conventional methods fail for EEG FMs because task-relevant semantics are often distributed across intermediate layers, and aggressive dimensionality reduction can distort oscillatory structure via representational collapse and aliasing. To address these challenges, we propose DLink (Distilling Layer-wise and Dominant Knowledge), a unified framework for transferring knowledge from large EEG FMs to compact students with three key innovations: (1) a dynamic Router that adaptively aggregates teacher layers to capture dominant intermediate representations; (2) an EEG MiC student with a Mimic-then-Compress pipeline, which inherits high-dimensional teacher features and then applies structured spatio-temporal compression to avoid a heavy classification head; and (3) spectral distillation that aligns teacher-student representations in the frequency domain to regularize compression and mitigate aliasing and temporal jitter. Experiments on four EEG benchmarks show that DLink enables compact students to outperform lightweight baselines while approaching fully fine-tuned FM performance at substantially lower model size and inference cost.
Abstract:Electroencephalography (EEG)-based multimodal learning integrates brain signals with complementary modalities to improve mental state assessment, providing great clinical potential. The effectiveness of such paradigms largely depends on the representation learning on heterogeneous modalities. For EEG-based paradigms, one promising approach is to leverage their hierarchical structures, as recent studies have shown that both EEG and associated modalities (e.g., facial expressions) exhibit hierarchical structures reflecting complex cognitive processes. However, Euclidean embeddings struggle to represent these hierarchical structures due to their flat geometry, while hyperbolic spaces, with their exponential growth property, are naturally suited for them. In this work, we propose EEG-MoCE, a novel hyperbolic mixture-of-curvature experts framework designed for multimodal neurotechnology. EEG-MoCE assigns each modality to an expert in a learnable-curvature hyperbolic space, enabling adaptive modeling of its intrinsic geometry. A curvature-aware fusion strategy then dynamically weights experts, emphasizing modalities with richer hierarchical information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that EEG-MoCE achieves state-of-the-art performance, including emotion recognition, sleep staging, and cognitive assessment.
Abstract:Imitation learning is a powerful paradigm for training robotic policies, yet its performance is limited by compounding errors: minor policy inaccuracies could drive robots into unseen out-of-distribution (OOD) states in the training set, where the policy could generate even bigger errors, leading to eventual failures. While the Data Aggregation (DAgger) framework tries to address this issue, its reliance on continuous human involvement severely limits scalability. In this paper, we propose WM-DAgger, an efficient data aggregation framework that leverages World Models to synthesize OOD recovery data without requiring human involvement. Specifically, we focus on manipulation tasks with an eye-in-hand robotic arm and only few-shot demonstrations. To avoid synthesizing misleading data and overcome the hallucination issues inherent to World Models, our framework introduces two key mechanisms: (1) a Corrective Action Synthesis Module that generates task-oriented recovery actions to prevent misleading supervision, and (2) a Consistency-Guided Filtering Module that discards physically implausible trajectories by anchoring terminal synthesized frames to corresponding real frames in expert demonstrations. We extensively validate WM-DAgger on multiple real-world robotic tasks. Results that our method significantly improves success rates, achieving a 93.3\% success rate in soft bag pushing with only five demonstrations. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/czs12354-xxdbd/WM-Dagger.
Abstract:Foley art plays a pivotal role in enhancing immersive auditory experiences in film, yet manual creation of spatio-temporally aligned audio remains labor-intensive. We propose FoleyDesigner, a novel framework inspired by professional Foley workflows, integrating film clip analysis, spatio-temporally controllable Foley generation, and professional audio mixing capabilities. FoleyDesigner employs a multi-agent architecture for precise spatio-temporal analysis. It achieves spatio-temporal alignment through latent diffusion models trained on spatio-temporal cues extracted from video frames, combined with large language model (LLM)-driven hybrid mechanisms that emulate post-production practices in film industry. To address the lack of high-quality stereo audio datasets in film, we introduce FilmStereo, the first professional stereo audio dataset containing spatial metadata, precise timestamps, and semantic annotations for eight common Foley categories. For applications, the framework supports interactive user control while maintaining seamless integration with professional pipelines, including 5.1-channel Dolby Atmos systems compliant with ITU-R BS.775 standards, thereby offering extensive creative flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior spatio-temporal alignment compared to existing baselines, with seamless compatibility with professional film production standards. The project page is available at https://gekiii996.github.io/FoleyDesigner/ .
Abstract:Standard Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing final outputs, yet it typically treats the teacher's intermediate layer's thought process as a black box. While feature-based distillation attempts to bridge this gap, existing methods (e.g., MSE and asymmetric KL divergence) ignore the rich uncertainty profiles required for the final output. In this paper, we introduce DistillLens, a framework that symmetrically aligns the evolving thought processes of student and teacher models. By projecting intermediate hidden states into the vocabulary space via the Logit Lens, we enforce structural alignment using a symmetric divergence objective. Our analysis proves that this constraint imposes a dual-sided penalty, preventing both overconfidence and underconfidence while preserving the high-entropy information conduits essential for final deduction. Extensive experiments on GPT-2 and Llama architectures demonstrate that DistillLens consistently outperforms standard KD and feature-transfer baselines on diverse instruction-following benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/manishdhakal/DistillLens.
Abstract:Self-correction is essential for solving complex reasoning problems in vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle to learn it, as effective self-correction behaviors emerge only rarely, making learning signals extremely sparse. To address this challenge, we propose correction-specific rollouts (Octopus), an RL rollout augmentation framework that synthesizes dense self-correction examples by recombining existing rollouts. This augmentation simultaneously improves sample efficiency due to rollout reuse and stabilizes RL optimization through balanced supervision. Furthermore, we introduce a response-masking strategy that decouples self-correction from direct reasoning, avoiding signal conflicts and enabling both behaviors to be learned effectively. Building on this, we introduce Octopus-8B, a reasoning VLM with controllable self-correction capability. Across 7 benchmarks, it achieves SoTA performance among open-source VLMs, outperforming the best RLVR baseline by 1.0 score while requiring only $0.72\times$ training time per step.