Taming Outlier Tokens in Diffusion Transformers

We study outlier tokens in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for image generation. Prior work has shown that Vision Transformers (ViTs) can produce a small number of high-norm tokens that attract disproportionate attention while carrying limited local information, but their role in generative models remains underexplored. We show that this phenomenon appears in both the encoder and denoiser of modern Representation Autoencoder (RAE)-DiT pipelines: pretrained ViT encoders can produce outlier representations, and DiTs themselves can develop internal outlier tokens, especially in intermediate layers. Moreover, simply masking high-norm tokens does not improve performance, indicating that the problem is not only caused by a few extreme values, but is more closely related to corrupted local patch semantics. To address this issue, we introduce Dual-Stage Registers (DSR), a register-based intervention for both components: trained registers when available, recursive test-time registers otherwise, and diffusion registers for the denoiser. Across ImageNet and large-scale text-to-image generation, these interventions consistently reduce outlier artifacts and improve generation quality. Our results highlight outlier-token control as an important ingredient in building stronger DiTs.

Joint Energy Management and Coordinated AIGC Workload Scheduling for Distributed Data Centers: A Diffusion-Aided Reward Shaping Approach

Artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for automating the creation of diverse and customized content, giving rise to rapidly growing computational workloads in cloud data centers. It is imperative for AIGC service providers (ASPs) to strategically schedule AIGC workloads to reduce data center energy costs while guaranteeing high-quality content generation. However, the distinctive characteristics of AIGC services pose critical challenges, including model heterogeneity across ASPs, implicit service quality evaluation, and complex inference process control. To tackle these challenges, we propose a joint energy management and coordinated AIGC workload scheduling framework, which introduces an explicit mathematical characterization of service quality to promote both job transfer among ASPs and fine-grained inference process configuration. Moreover, various energy resources within data centers are jointly considered to enhance power usage flexibility. Subsequently, a system utility maximization problem is formulated to balance AIGC service revenue with operational penalties and costs. Nevertheless, the strong coupling among job scheduling decisions induces severe reward sparsity, which limits the effectiveness of existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms. To address this issue, we develop a diffusion model-aided reward shaping approach to synthesize complementary reward signals through a multi-step denoising process. This approach is seamlessly integrated with DRL to enable efficient learning of scheduling policies under sparse environmental feedback. Experiments based on real-world models and datasets demonstrate that our scheme effectively accommodates electricity price fluctuations and AIGC model heterogeneity, while achieving superior learning convergence and system utility compared with benchmark methods.

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.

Reward Hacking in the Era of Large Models: Mechanisms, Emergent Misalignment, Challenges

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these approaches introduce a systemic vulnerability: reward hacking, where models exploit imperfections in learned reward signals to maximize proxy objectives without fulfilling true task intent. As models scale and optimization intensifies, such exploitation manifests as verbosity bias, sycophancy, hallucinated justification, benchmark overfitting, and, in multimodal settings, perception--reasoning decoupling and evaluator manipulation. Recent evidence further suggests that seemingly benign shortcut behaviors can generalize into broader forms of misalignment, including deception and strategic gaming of oversight mechanisms. In this survey, we propose the Proxy Compression Hypothesis (PCH) as a unifying framework for understanding reward hacking. We formalize reward hacking as an emergent consequence of optimizing expressive policies against compressed reward representations of high-dimensional human objectives. Under this view, reward hacking arises from the interaction of objective compression, optimization amplification, and evaluator--policy co-adaptation. This perspective unifies empirical phenomena across RLHF, RLAIF, and RLVR regimes, and explains how local shortcut learning can generalize into broader forms of misalignment, including deception and strategic manipulation of oversight mechanisms. We further organize detection and mitigation strategies according to how they intervene on compression, amplification, or co-adaptation dynamics. By framing reward hacking as a structural instability of proxy-based alignment under scale, we highlight open challenges in scalable oversight, multimodal grounding, and agentic autonomy.

EMMa: End-Effector Stability-Oriented Mobile Manipulation for Tracked Rescue Robots

The autonomous operation of tracked mobile manipulators in rescue missions requires not only ensuring the reachability and safety of robot motion but also maintaining stable end-effector manipulation under diverse task demands. However, existing studies have overlooked many end-effector motion properties at both the planning and control levels. This paper presents a motion generation framework for tracked mobile manipulators to achieve stable end-effector operation in complex rescue scenarios. The framework formulates a coordinated path optimization model that couples end-effector and mobile base states and designs compact cost/constraint representations to mitigate nonlinearities and reduce computational complexity. Furthermore, an isolated control scheme with feedforward compensation and feedback regulation is developed to enable coordinated path tracking for the robot. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments on rescue scenarios demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms SOTA methods across key metrics, including task success rate and end-effector motion stability, validating its effectiveness and robustness in complex mobile manipulation tasks.

USCNet: Transformer-Based Multimodal Fusion with Segmentation Guidance for Urolithiasis Classification

Kidney stone disease ranks among the most prevalent conditions in urology, and understanding the composition of these stones is essential for creating personalized treatment plans and preventing recurrence. Current methods for analyzing kidney stones depend on postoperative specimens, which prevents rapid classification before surgery. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new approach called the Urinary Stone Segmentation and Classification Network (USCNet). This innovative method allows for precise preoperative classification of kidney stones by integrating Computed Tomography (CT) images with clinical data from Electronic Health Records (EHR). USCNet employs a Transformer-based multimodal fusion framework with CT-EHR attention and segmentation-guided attention modules for accurate classification. Moreover, a dynamic loss function is introduced to effectively balance the dual objectives of segmentation and classification. Experiments on an in-house kidney stone dataset show that USCNet demonstrates outstanding performance across all evaluation metrics, with its classification efficacy significantly surpassing existing mainstream methods. This study presents a promising solution for the precise preoperative classification of kidney stones, offering substantial clinical benefits. The source code has been made publicly available: https://github.com/ZhangSongqi0506/KidneyStone.

Breakthrough the Suboptimal Stable Point in Value-Factorization-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Value factorization, a popular paradigm in MARL, faces significant theoretical and algorithmic bottlenecks: its tendency to converge to suboptimal solutions remains poorly understood and unsolved. Theoretically, existing analyses fail to explain this due to their primary focus on the optimal case. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel theoretical concept: the stable point, which characterizes the potential convergence of value factorization in general cases. Through an analysis of stable point distributions in existing methods, we reveal that non-optimal stable points are the primary cause of poor performance. However, algorithmically, making the optimal action the unique stable point is nearly infeasible. In contrast, iteratively filtering suboptimal actions by rendering them unstable emerges as a more practical approach for global optimality. Inspired by this, we propose a novel Multi-Round Value Factorization (MRVF) framework. Specifically, by measuring a non-negative payoff increment relative to the previously selected action, MRVF transforms inferior actions into unstable points, thereby driving each iteration toward a stable point with a superior action. Experiments on challenging benchmarks, including predator-prey tasks and StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC), validate our analysis of stable points and demonstrate the superiority of MRVF over state-of-the-art methods.

StreamingEval: A Unified Evaluation Protocol towards Realistic Streaming Video Understanding

Real-time, continuous understanding of visual signals is essential for real-world interactive AI applications, and poses a fundamental system-level challenge. Existing research on streaming video understanding, however, typically focuses on isolated aspects such as question-answering accuracy under limited visual context or improvements in encoding efficiency, while largely overlooking practical deployability under realistic resource constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce StreamingEval, a unified evaluation framework for assessing the streaming video understanding capabilities of Video-LLMs under realistic constraints. StreamingEval benchmarks both mainstream offline models and recent online video models under a standardized protocol, explicitly characterizing the trade-off between efficiency, storage and accuracy. Specifically, we adopt a fixed-capacity memory bank to normalize accessible historical visual context, and jointly evaluate visual encoding efficiency, text decoding latency, and task performance to quantify overall system deployability. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets reveal substantial gaps between current Video-LLMs and the requirements of realistic streaming applications, providing a systematic basis for future research in this direction. Codes will be released at https://github.com/wwgTang-111/StreamingEval1.

Grammar of the Wave: Towards Explainable Multivariate Time Series Event Detection via Neuro-Symbolic VLM Agents

Time Series Event Detection (TSED) has long been an important task with critical applications across many high-stakes domains. Unlike statistical anomalies, events are defined by semantics with complex internal structures, which are difficult to learn inductively from scarce labeled data in real-world settings. In light of this, we introduce Knowledge-Guided TSED, a new setting where a model is given a natural-language event description and must ground it to intervals in multivariate signals with little or no training data. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Event Logic Tree (ELT), a novel knowledge representation framework to bridge linguistic descriptions and physical time series data via modeling the intrinsic temporal-logic structures of events. Based on ELT, we present a neuro-symbolic VLM agent framework that iteratively instantiates primitives from signal visualizations and composes them under ELT constraints, producing both detected intervals and faithful explanations in the form of instantiated trees. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we release a benchmark based on real-world time series data with expert knowledge and annotations. Experiments and human evaluation demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to supervised fine-tuning baselines and existing zero-shot time series reasoning frameworks based on LLMs/VLMs. We also show that ELT is critical in mitigating VLMs' inherent hallucination in matching signal morphology with event semantics.

T2S-Bench & Structure-of-Thought: Benchmarking and Prompting Comprehensive Text-to-Structure Reasoning

Think about how human handles complex reading tasks: marking key points, inferring their relationships, and structuring information to guide understanding and responses. Likewise, can a large language model benefit from text structure to enhance text-processing performance? To explore it, in this work, we first introduce Structure of Thought (SoT), a prompting technique that explicitly guides models to construct intermediate text structures, consistently boosting performance across eight tasks and three model families. Building upon this insight, we present T2S-Bench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate and improve text-to-structure capabilities of models. T2S-Bench includes 1.8K samples across 6 scientific domains and 32 structural types, rigorously constructed to ensure accuracy, fairness, and quality. Evaluation on 45 mainstream models reveals substantial improvement potential: the average accuracy on the multi-hop reasoning task is only 52.1%, and even the most advanced model achieves 58.1% node accuracy in end-to-end extraction. Furthermore, on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, SoT alone yields an average +5.7% improvement across eight diverse text-processing tasks, and fine-tuning on T2S-Bench further increases this gain to +8.6%. These results highlight the value of explicit text structuring and the complementary contributions of SoT and T2S-Bench. Dataset and eval code have been released at https://t2s-bench.github.io/T2S-Bench-Page/.