ST-VLA: Enabling 4D-Aware Spatiotemporal Understanding for General Robot Manipulation

Robotic manipulation in open-world environments requires reasoning across semantics, geometry, and long-horizon action dynamics. Existing hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks typically use 2D representations to connect high-level reasoning with low-level control, but lack depth awareness and temporal consistency, limiting robustness in complex 3D scenes. We propose ST-VLA, a hierarchical VLA framework using a unified 3D-4D representation to bridge perception and action. ST-VLA converts 2D guidance into 3D trajectories and generates smooth spatial masks that capture 4D spatio-temporal context, providing a stable interface between semantic reasoning and continuous control. To enable effective learning of such representations, we introduce ST-Human, a large-scale human manipulation dataset with 14 tasks and 300k episodes, annotated with 2D, 3D, and 4D supervision via a semi-automated pipeline. Using ST-Human, we train ST-VLM, a spatio-temporal vision-language model that generates spatially grounded and temporally coherent 3D representations to guide policy execution. The smooth spatial masks focus on task-relevant geometry and stabilize latent representations, enabling online replanning and long-horizon reasoning. Experiments on RLBench and real-world manipulation tasks show that \method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving zero-shot success rates by 44.6% and 30.3%. These results demonstrate that offloading spatio-temporal reasoning to VLMs with unified 3D-4D representations substantially improves robustness and generalization for open-world robotic manipulation. Project website: https://oucx117.github.io/ST-VLA/.

From AI Weather Prediction to Infrastructure Resilience: A Correction-Downscaling Framework for Tropical Cyclone Impacts

This paper addresses a missing capability in infrastructure resilience: turning fast, global AI weather forecasts into asset-scale, actionable risk. We introduce the AI-based Correction-Downscaling Framework (ACDF), which transforms coarse AI weather prediction (AIWP) into 500-m, unbiased wind fields and transmission tower/line failure probabilities for tropical cyclones. ACDF separates storm-scale bias correction from terrain-aware downscaling, preventing error propagation while restoring sub-kilometer variability that governs structural loading. Tested on 11 typhoons affecting Zhejiang, China under leave-one-storm-out evaluation, ACDF reduces station-scale wind-speed MAE by 38.8% versus Pangu-Weather, matches observation-assimilated mesoscale analyses, yet runs in 25 s per 12-h cycle on a single GPU. In the Typhoon Hagupit case, ACDF reproduced observed high-wind tails, isolated a coastal high-risk corridor, and flagged the line that failed, demonstrating actionable guidance at tower and line scales. ACDF provides an end-to-end pathway from AI global forecasts to operational, impact-based early warning for critical infrastructure.

SpiralFormer: Looped Transformers Can Learn Hierarchical Dependencies via Multi-Resolution Recursion

Recursive (looped) Transformers decouple computational depth from parameter depth by repeatedly applying shared layers, providing an explicit architectural primitive for iterative refinement and latent reasoning. However, early looped Transformers often underperform non-recursive baselines of equal compute. While recent literature has introduced more effective recursion mechanisms to mitigate this gap, existing architectures still operate at a fixed, full-token resolution, neglecting the potential efficiency of computing over compressed latent representations. In this paper, we propose SpiralFormer, a looped Transformer that executes recurrence under a multi-resolution recursion schedule. We provide probing evidence that multi-resolution recursion enables the model to learn hierarchical dependencies by inducing iteration-wise functional specialization across different scales. Empirically, SpiralFormer achieves better parameter and compute efficiency than both looped and non-looped baselines across model scales from 160M to 1.4B, establishing sequence resolution as a potential axis for scaling recursive architectures.

JoyVoice: Long-Context Conditioning for Anthropomorphic Multi-Speaker Conversational Synthesis

Large speech generation models are evolving from single-speaker, short sentence synthesis to multi-speaker, long conversation geneartion. Current long-form speech generation models are predominately constrained to dyadic, turn-based interactions. To address this, we introduce JoyVoice, a novel anthropomorphic foundation model designed for flexible, boundary-free synthesis of up to eight speakers. Unlike conventional cascaded systems, JoyVoice employs a unified E2E-Transformer-DiT architecture that utilizes autoregressive hidden representations directly for diffusion inputs, enabling holistic end-to-end optimization. We further propose a MM-Tokenizer operating at a low bitrate of 12.5 Hz, which integrates multitask semantic and MMSE losses to effectively model both semantic and acoustic information. Additionally, the model incorporates robust text front-end processing via large-scale data perturbation. Experiments show that JoyVoice achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual generation (Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean) and zero-shot voice cloning. JoyVoice achieves top-tier results on both the Seed-TTS-Eval Benchmark and multi-speaker long-form conversational voice cloning tasks, demonstrating superior audio quality and generalization. It achieves significant improvements in prosodic continuity for long-form speech, rhythm richness in multi-speaker conversations, paralinguistic naturalness, besides superior intelligibility. We encourage readers to listen to the demo at https://jea-speech.github.io/JoyVoice

Fishing for Answers: Exploring One-shot vs. Iterative Retrieval Strategies for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based on Large Language Models (LLMs) is a powerful solution to understand and query the industry's closed-source documents. However, basic RAG often struggles with complex QA tasks in legal and regulatory domains, particularly when dealing with numerous government documents. The top-$k$ strategy frequently misses golden chunks, leading to incomplete or inaccurate answers. To address these retrieval bottlenecks, we explore two strategies to improve evidence coverage and answer quality. The first is a One-SHOT retrieval method that adaptively selects chunks based on a token budget, allowing as much relevant content as possible to be included within the model's context window. Additionally, we design modules to further filter and refine the chunks. The second is an iterative retrieval strategy built on a Reasoning Agentic RAG framework, where a reasoning LLM dynamically issues search queries, evaluates retrieved results, and progressively refines the context over multiple turns. We identify query drift and retrieval laziness issues and further design two modules to tackle them. Through extensive experiments on a dataset of government documents, we aim to offer practical insights and guidance for real-world applications in legal and regulatory domains.

Gradient Rectification for Robust Calibration under Distribution Shift

Deep neural networks often produce overconfident predictions, undermining their reliability in safety-critical applications. This miscalibration is further exacerbated under distribution shift, where test data deviates from the training distribution due to environmental or acquisition changes. While existing approaches improve calibration through training-time regularization or post-hoc adjustment, their reliance on access to or simulation of target domains limits their practicality in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration framework that operates without access to target domain information. From a frequency-domain perspective, we identify that distribution shifts often distort high-frequency visual cues exploited by deep models, and introduce a low-frequency filtering strategy to encourage reliance on domain-invariant features. However, such information loss may degrade In-Distribution (ID) calibration performance. Therefore, we further propose a gradient-based rectification mechanism that enforces ID calibration as a hard constraint during optimization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world shifted datasets, including CIFAR-10/100-C and WILDS, demonstrate that our method significantly improves calibration under distribution shift while maintaining strong in-distribution performance.

Reasoning RAG via System 1 or System 2: A Survey on Reasoning Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Industry Challenges

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful framework to overcome the knowledge limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external retrieval with language generation. While early RAG systems based on static pipelines have shown effectiveness in well-structured tasks, they struggle in real-world scenarios requiring complex reasoning, dynamic retrieval, and multi-modal integration. To address these challenges, the field has shifted toward Reasoning Agentic RAG, a paradigm that embeds decision-making and adaptive tool use directly into the retrieval process. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Reasoning Agentic RAG methods, categorizing them into two primary systems: predefined reasoning, which follows fixed modular pipelines to boost reasoning, and agentic reasoning, where the model autonomously orchestrates tool interaction during inference. We analyze representative techniques under both paradigms, covering architectural design, reasoning strategies, and tool coordination. Finally, we discuss key research challenges and propose future directions to advance the flexibility, robustness, and applicability of reasoning agentic RAG systems. Our collection of the relevant research has been organized into a https://github.com/ByebyeMonica/Reasoning-Agentic-RAG.

In-Context Brush: Zero-shot Customized Subject Insertion with Context-Aware Latent Space Manipulation

Recent advances in diffusion models have enhanced multimodal-guided visual generation, enabling customized subject insertion that seamlessly "brushes" user-specified objects into a given image guided by textual prompts. However, existing methods often struggle to insert customized subjects with high fidelity and align results with the user's intent through textual prompts. In this work, we propose "In-Context Brush", a zero-shot framework for customized subject insertion by reformulating the task within the paradigm of in-context learning. Without loss of generality, we formulate the object image and the textual prompts as cross-modal demonstrations, and the target image with the masked region as the query. The goal is to inpaint the target image with the subject aligning textual prompts without model tuning. Building upon a pretrained MMDiT-based inpainting network, we perform test-time enhancement via dual-level latent space manipulation: intra-head "latent feature shifting" within each attention head that dynamically shifts attention outputs to reflect the desired subject semantics and inter-head "attention reweighting" across different heads that amplifies prompt controllability through differential attention prioritization. Extensive experiments and applications demonstrate that our approach achieves superior identity preservation, text alignment, and image quality compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, without requiring dedicated training or additional data collection.

Learning Occlusion-Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking

Single-stream architectures using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones show great potential for real-time UAV tracking recently. However, frequent occlusions from obstacles like buildings and trees expose a major drawback: these models often lack strategies to handle occlusions effectively. New methods are needed to enhance the occlusion resilience of single-stream ViT models in aerial tracking. In this work, we propose to learn Occlusion-Robust Representations (ORR) based on ViTs for UAV tracking by enforcing an invariance of the feature representation of a target with respect to random masking operations modeled by a spatial Cox process. Hopefully, this random masking approximately simulates target occlusions, thereby enabling us to learn ViTs that are robust to target occlusion for UAV tracking. This framework is termed ORTrack. Additionally, to facilitate real-time applications, we propose an Adaptive Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation (AFKD) method to create a more compact tracker, which adaptively mimics the behavior of the teacher model ORTrack according to the task's difficulty. This student model, dubbed ORTrack-D, retains much of ORTrack's performance while offering higher efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance. Codes is available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/ORTrack.

Affordable AI Assistants with Knowledge Graph of Thoughts

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the development of AI assistants capable of performing diverse tasks across domains. However, current state-of-the-art LLM-driven agents face significant challenges, including high operational costs and limited success rates on complex benchmarks like GAIA. To address these issues, we propose the Knowledge Graph of Thoughts (KGoT), an innovative AI assistant architecture that integrates LLM reasoning with dynamically constructed knowledge graphs (KGs). KGoT extracts and structures task-relevant knowledge into a dynamic KG representation, iteratively enhanced through external tools such as math solvers, web crawlers, and Python scripts. Such structured representation of task-relevant knowledge enables low-cost models to solve complex tasks effectively. For example, KGoT achieves a 29% improvement in task success rates on the GAIA benchmark compared to Hugging Face Agents with GPT-4o mini, while reducing costs by over 36x compared to GPT-4o. Improvements for recent reasoning models are similar, e.g., 36% and 37.5% for Qwen2.5-32B and Deepseek-R1-70B, respectively. KGoT offers a scalable, affordable, and high-performing solution for AI assistants.