LLM can Read Spectrogram: Encoder-free Speech-Language Modeling

Recent speech-aware large language models (Speech-LLMs) rely on a pre-trained speech encoder to convert audio into semantic-rich representations consumable by LLM. In this work, instead, we explore: can an LLM learn to read Mel spectrogram directly without a dedicated speech encoder? We propose Mel-LLM, an encoder-free Speech-LLM that feeds lightly pre-processed Mel spectrogram patches directly into the LLM through a linear projection, allowing the LLM to learn speech-text alignment purely through its own parameters. We conduct extensive experiments on both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) tasks. For ASR, we evaluate on the OpenASR leaderboard public sets and production-level scaling experiments, demonstrating that the encoder-free solution achieves competitive performance with only limited degradation compared to encoder-initialized counterparts. We find that when data is limited, initialization from a multimodal checkpoint (Phi-4-MM) is crucial for maintaining performance. We also present ablation studies revealing which LLM layers are less relevant to speech encoding. For TTS, we show preliminary results with a next-token VAE approach. While TTS performance is not yet optimal, these results establish the feasibility of a fully unified encoder-free architecture for autoregressive speech-text modeling.

CoSTA: Cognitive-State-Conditioned TTS Data Augmentation Using ASR Transcripts for Alzheimer's Disease Detection

Speech-based Alzheimer's Disease (AD) detection is constrained by scarce pathological speech data. To address this, we propose CoSTA, a Text-to-Speech (TTS)-based data augmentation framework. Specifically, we first develop two Cognitive-State-Conditioned (CS-Cond) TTS models by adapting CosyVoice2 and F5-TTS to synthesize speech with distinct AD and Healthy Control characteristics. Furthermore, by constructing a transcript pool comprising Manual Transcripts (MT) and 36 Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts, we investigate the impact of text sources on TTS-based augmentation. We also perform augmentation-factor analysis and test-time augmentation. Experiments on the ADReSS dataset show that CS-Cond TTS significantly improves synthetic speech utility, and ASR-driven augmentation frequently outperforms MT-driven augmentation. Finally, CoSTA yields a 4.16% gain over the baseline, achieving an audio-only accuracy of 85.83% on the ADReSS test set and outperforming prior methods.

Order within Chaos: Capturing Intrinsic Energy Anomalies for AI-Manipulated Image Forgery Localization

Recent advancements in generative AI have led to image editing models capable of producing realistic forgeries that evade traditional image forgery localization methods, as these approaches depend on physical noise absent in synthetic data. To address this challenge, we theoretically demonstrate that the diffusion process inherently suppresses local high-frequency variance, creating a statistical energy gap that is distinguishable from the natural entropy of optical imaging. Guided by this insight, we propose FLAME, a unified framework that utilizes a LAD map to capture these intrinsic anomalies, coupled with a parameter-efficient adapter for SAM to achieve precise, pixel-level forgery localization. Furthermore, to bridge the lag between forensic benchmarks and evolving generative models, we introduce EditStream, an automated pipeline for continuous, instruction-based training data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FLAME establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming previous methods on AI-generated forgery datasets while effectively generalizing to unseen generative architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/phoenixnir/FLAME.

Data-Efficient On-Policy Distillation for Automatic Speech Recognition

Building competitive automatic speech recognition (ASR) models usually requires large-scale au- dio supervision, which makes reproduction and specialization expensive. We study Ark-ASR, a 0.6B- parameter audio-conditioned language model trained with 100k hours of speech, and examine whether a strong Qwen-ASR teacher can transfer additional recognition capability through on-policy distillation. Across Mandarin and English ASR benchmarks, the proposed training recipe consistently improves over supervised fine-tuning alone and outperforms the same-scale Qwen3-ASR-0.6B baseline on four of five evaluation sets. This is achieved with only 100k hours of speech, compared with the 20M hours of super- vised audio reported for the Qwen3-Omni AuT encoder. The larger Qwen3-ASR-1.7B remains stronger, but the results show that teacher-guided on-policy training can substantially close the gap for compact ASR models under a much smaller audio budget. A support-overlap diagnostic further suggests that the teacher-data stage improves local student-teacher compatibility, matching recent analyses of when on-policy distillation is effective.

Garment Particles: A 2D--3D Symmetric Garment Representation for Generation and Editing

Practical garment design spans two modes: intuitive creation from high-level intent, such as a reference image or text description, and complex low-level editing across 2D sewing patterns and 3D draped geometry, which requires professional training to navigate their complex interdependencies. Yet existing frameworks address only part of this challenge, offering either garment generation from casual inputs or direct editing on sewing patterns. To support both ends of the spectrum, we propose Garment Particles, a 5D point-cloud representation that jointly encodes 2D sewing patterns and 3D geometry. This representation enables Garment Particles Flow (GPF), a rectified flow framework that supports intuitive generation from high-level inputs (text, images, sketches) and various editing operations on 2D sewing patterns and 3D geometries via diffusion posterior sampling. Finally, we introduce Particles-to-Pattern Flow that converts generated garment particles into curved-based patterns for simulation. We validate our model's generation ability on multiple datasets, achieving state-of-the-art garment generation results against competitive baselines. Our model also enables many garment editing scenarios, including garment interpolation, sewing pattern editing, point-cloud- and silhouette-conditioned garment generation. Our project website is at https://garment-particles.github.io .

Factorize to Generalize: Retrieval-Guided Invariant-Dynamic Decomposition for Time Series Forecasting

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have recently achieved strong zero-shot forecasting performance through large-scale pretraining and retrieval-augmented prediction. However, our empirical analysis reveals a non-trivial limitation of retrieval-based forecasting: retrieval tends to induce more oscillatory predictions, improving performance on highly fluctuating series while degrading accuracy on smoother, trend-dominated ones. This suggests that retrieved information may be fused into prediction without explicitly distinguishing stable temporal structure from instance-specific variations, which can reduce robustness under distribution shifts. We propose a Retrieval-guided Invariant-Dynamic DEcomposition framework for time series forecasting. Rather than using retrieval as auxiliary predictive context, we leverage retrieved sequences as implicit samples from related environments to guide representation decomposition. Specifically, we first construct a retrieval-aware representation via attention-based aggregation, and then introduce a retrieval-guided routing mechanism to decompose it into an invariant component capturing stable shared structure and a dynamic component modeling context-dependent variations. These two components are forecast separately and fused for final prediction, enabling the model to preserve transferable patterns while remaining adaptive to evolving dynamics. We further design training objectives that encourage invariant learning and disentanglement, and provide theoretical insight showing that retrieval aggregation reduces variance and approximates invariant representation learning without explicit environment supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently improves robustness under distribution shifts and outperforms existing TSFMs and retrieval-based baselines in zero-shot forecasting settings.

Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization Through Textual Guidance

Zero-shot temporal action localization (ZS-TAL) consists of classifying and localizing actions in untrimmed videos, where action classes are unseen at training time. Existing work uses Vision and Language Models (VLMs), taking advantage of their strong zero-shot transfer capabilities. Yet, these models face evident challenges with fine-grained action classification, making it difficult to directly use them to distinguish between the presence and absence of an action. Most current methods for ZS-TAL address these challenges by training models on large-scale video datasets, which require annotated data and often result in limited generalization performance. Recently, approaches discarding the use of labeled data have emerged as an alternative. Following this direction, we propose a novel approach, ``Textual Guidance for finer localization of actions in videos'' (TEGU), that compensates for the lack of supervision from training data by exploiting rich textual information derived from large language models and structured text extracted from captions. This additional linguistic context can improve fine-grained discrimination by providing richer cues about fine-grained action differences within videos. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by conducting experiments on the THUMOS14 and the ActivityNet-v1.3 datasets. Our results show that, by exploiting rich textual information for improved action localization, TEGU outperforms state-of-the-art ZS-TAL approaches that do not involve training

Tiny-Engram: Trigger-Indexed Concept Tables for Generative Vision

Current personalization methods for generative vision models typically encode new concepts through continuous adapters or weight updates, yet provide limited control over whether and when a concept should be retrieved. In this work, we introduce Tiny-Engram, a compact trigger-indexed concept table that gives visual memories an explicit lexical address and activation boundary inside frozen image and video generators. Tiny-Engram parameterizes each concept as a small set of memory entries indexed by registered n-gram matches, which modulate text-encoder hidden states only within the matched trigger region. Outside this lexical support, the conditioning pathway is identical to that of the frozen base model. Across both single-encoder latent diffusion and multi-encoder diffusion-transformer backbones, this formulation binds a rare trigger phrase to a target identity while preserving compositional control from the surrounding prompt. We further evaluate the same table-based memory in a text-conditioned video generation setting, where the trigger path reliably alters the generated subject but fine-grained identity persistence across held-out video prompts remains limited. Taken together, these results suggest that small, explicitly addressed concept tables are a practical route to modular visual personalization, with strongest evidence in image generation. For video diffusion, the remaining gap points to a broader requirement: temporally stable identity likely depends on tighter coupling between text-side memory and the evolving visual state, motivating future work on memory injection beyond the text-conditioning interface.

Anon: Extrapolating Adaptivity Beyond SGD and Adam

Adaptive optimizers such as Adam have achieved great success in training large-scale models like large language models and diffusion models. However, they often generalize worse than non-adaptive methods, such as SGD on classical architectures like CNNs. We identify a key cause of this performance gap: adaptivity in pre-conditioners, which limits the optimizer's ability to adapt to diverse optimization landscapes. To address this, we propose Anon (Adaptivity Non-restricted Optimizer with Novel convergence technique), a novel optimizer with continuously tunable adaptivity in R, allowing it to interpolate between SGD-like and Adam-like behaviors and even extrapolate beyond both. To ensure convergence across the entire adaptivity spectrum, we introduce incremental delay update (IDU), a novel mechanism that is more flexible than AMSGrad's hard max-tracking strategy and enhances robustness to gradient noise. We theoretically establish convergence guarantees under both convex and non-convex settings. Empirically, Anon consistently outperforms state-of-the-art optimizers on representative image classification, diffusion, and language modeling tasks. These results demonstrate that adaptivity can serve as a valuable tunable design principle, and Anon provides the first unified and reliable framework capable of bridging the gap between classical and modern optimizers and surpassing their advantageous properties.

ANO: A Principled Approach to Robust Policy Optimization

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominates reinforcement learning and LLM alignment but relies on a "hard clipping" mechanism that discards valuable gradients. Conversely, unconstrained methods like SPO expose the optimization to unbounded updates, causing severe instability and policy collapse during extreme outlier encounters. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce a principled design space for policy optimization, demonstrating that a robust estimator must inherently suppress outliers while maintaining a smooth restoration force. Guided by these geometric principles, we derive Anchored Neighborhood Optimization (ANO), a novel method that seamlessly replaces hard clipping with a redescending gradient mechanism. Extensive evaluations demonstrate ANO's empirical superiority across diverse domains. In continuous (MuJoCo) and discrete (Atari) control, ANO establishes a robust state-of-the-art, uniquely preventing policy collapse even under highly aggressive learning rates ($1 \times 10^{-3}$). Furthermore, in LLM alignment (RLHF), ANO explicitly eliminates the catastrophic KL divergence explosion inherent to unconstrained methods, dominating PPO, SPO, and GRPO in head-to-head win rates.