Abstract:Reward Models (RMs) are critical components in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline, directly determining the alignment quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have emerged as a superior paradigm, offering higher interpretability and stronger generalization than traditional scalar RMs. However, existing methods for GRMs focus primarily on outcome-level supervision, neglecting analytical process quality, which constrains their potential. To address this, we propose ReflectRM, a novel GRM that leverages self-reflection to assess analytical quality and enhance preference modeling. ReflectRM is trained under a unified generative framework for joint modeling of response preference and analysis preference. During inference, we use its self-reflection capability to identify the most reliable analysis, from which the final preference prediction is derived. Experiments across four benchmarks show that ReflectRM consistently improves performance, achieving an average accuracy gain of +3.7 on Qwen3-4B. Further experiments confirm that response preference and analysis preference are mutually reinforcing. Notably, ReflectRM substantially mitigates positional bias, yielding +10.2 improvement compared with leading GRMs and establishing itself as a more stable evaluator.
Abstract:Generative reward models (GRMs) have emerged as a promising approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences by offering greater representational capacity and flexibility than traditional scalar reward models. However, GRMs face two major challenges: reliance on costly human-annotated data restricts scalability, and self-training approaches often suffer from instability and vulnerability to reward hacking. To address these issues, we propose ConsistRM, a self-training framework that enables effective and stable GRM training without human annotations. ConsistRM incorporates the Consistency-Aware Answer Reward, which produces reliable pseudo-labels with temporal consistency, thereby providing more stable model optimization. Moreover, the Consistency-Aware Critique Reward is introduced to assess semantic consistency across multiple critiques and allocates fine-grained and differentiated rewards. Experiments on five benchmark datasets across four base models demonstrate that ConsistRM outperforms vanilla Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) by an average of 1.5%. Further analysis shows that ConsistRM enhances output consistency and mitigates position bias caused by input order, highlighting the effectiveness of consistency-aware rewards in improving GRMs.
Abstract:Pedestrian intention prediction needs to be accurate for autonomous vehicles to navigate safely in urban environments. We present a lightweight, socially informed architecture for pedestrian intention prediction. It fuses four behavioral streams (attention, position, situation, and interaction) using highway encoders, a compact 4-token Transformer, and global self-attention pooling. To quantify uncertainty, we incorporate two complementary heads: a variational bottleneck whose KL divergence captures epistemic uncertainty, and a Mahalanobis distance detector that identifies distributional shift. Together, these components yield calibrated probabilities and actionable risk scores without compromising efficiency. On the PSI 1.0 benchmark, our model outperforms recent vision language models by achieving 0.9 F1, 0.94 AUC-ROC, and 0.78 MCC by using only structured, interpretable features. On the more diverse PSI 2.0 dataset, where, to the best of our knowledge, no prior results exist, we establish a strong initial baseline of 0.78 F1 and 0.79 AUC-ROC. Selective prediction based on Mahalanobis scores increases test accuracy by up to 0.4 percentage points at 80% coverage. Qualitative attention heatmaps further show how the model shifts its cross-stream focus under ambiguity. The proposed approach is modality-agnostic, easy to integrate with vision language pipelines, and suitable for risk-aware intent prediction on resource-constrained platforms.
Abstract:Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) represent a promising paradigm for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing due to their bio-plausible and spike-driven characteristics. However, the robustness of SNNs in complex adversarial environments remains significantly constrained. In this study, we theoretically demonstrate that those threshold-neighboring spiking neurons are the key factors limiting the robustness of directly trained SNNs. We find that these neurons set the upper limits for the maximum potential strength of adversarial attacks and are prone to state-flipping under minor disturbances. To address this challenge, we propose a Threshold Guarding Optimization (TGO) method, which comprises two key aspects. First, we incorporate additional constraints into the loss function to move neurons' membrane potentials away from their thresholds. It increases SNNs' gradient sparsity, thereby reducing the theoretical upper bound of adversarial attacks. Second, we introduce noisy spiking neurons to transition the neuronal firing mechanism from deterministic to probabilistic, decreasing their state-flipping probability due to minor disturbances. Extensive experiments conducted in standard adversarial scenarios prove that our method significantly enhances the robustness of directly trained SNNs. These findings pave the way for advancing more reliable and secure neuromorphic computing in real-world applications.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL) has played a central role in recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs), yielding strong gains in verifiable and open-ended reasoning. However, training a single general-purpose LRM across diverse domains remains challenging due to pronounced domain heterogeneity. Through a systematic study of two widely used strategies, Sequential RL and Mixed RL, we find that both incur substantial cross-domain interference at the behavioral and gradient levels, resulting in limited overall gains. To address these challenges, we introduce **M**odular **G**radient **S**urgery (**MGS**), which resolves gradient conflicts at the module level within the transformer. When applied to Llama and Qwen models, MGS achieves average improvements of 4.3 (16.6\%) and 4.5 (11.1\%) points, respectively, over standard multi-task RL across three representative domains (math, general chat, and instruction following). Further analysis demonstrates that MGS remains effective under prolonged training. Overall, our study clarifies the sources of interference in multi-domain RL and presents an effective solution for training general-purpose LRMs.
Abstract:Semantic ID (SID)-based recommendation is a promising paradigm for scaling sequential recommender systems, but existing methods largely follow a semantic-centric pipeline: item embeddings are learned from foundation models and discretized using generic quantization schemes. This design is misaligned with generative recommendation objectives: semantic embeddings are weakly coupled with collaborative prediction, and generic quantization is inefficient at reducing sequential uncertainty for autoregressive modeling. To address these, we propose ReSID, a recommendation-native, principled SID framework that rethinks representation learning and quantization from the perspective of information preservation and sequential predictability, without relying on LLMs. ReSID consists of two components: (i) Field-Aware Masked Auto-Encoding (FAMAE), which learns predictive-sufficient item representations from structured features, and (ii) Globally Aligned Orthogonal Quantization (GAOQ), which produces compact and predictable SID sequences by jointly reducing semantic ambiguity and prefix-conditional uncertainty. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments across ten datasets show the effectiveness of ReSID. ReSID consistently outperforms strong sequential and SID-based generative baselines by an average of over 10%, while reducing tokenization cost by up to 122x. Code is available at https://github.com/FuCongResearchSquad/ReSID.
Abstract:Binary Spiking Neural Networks (BSNNs) offer promising efficiency advantages for resource-constrained computing. However, their training algorithms often require substantial memory overhead due to latent weights storage and temporal processing requirements. To address this issue, we propose Binary Spiking Online (BSO) optimization algorithm, a novel online training algorithm that significantly reduces training memory. BSO directly updates weights through flip signals under the online training framework. These signals are triggered when the product of gradient momentum and weights exceeds a threshold, eliminating the need for latent weights during training. To enhance performance, we propose T-BSO, a temporal-aware variant that leverages the inherent temporal dynamics of BSNNs by capturing gradient information across time steps for adaptive threshold adjustment. Theoretical analysis establishes convergence guarantees for both BSO and T-BSO, with formal regret bounds characterizing their convergence rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both BSO and T-BSO achieve superior optimization performance compared to existing training methods for BSNNs. The codes are available at https://github.com/hamings1/BSO.
Abstract:Embedding-based collaborative filtering, often coupled with nearest neighbor search, is widely deployed in large-scale recommender systems for personalized content selection. Modern systems leverage multiple implicit feedback signals (e.g., clicks, add to cart, purchases) to model user preferences comprehensively. However, prevailing approaches adopt a feedback-wise modeling paradigm, which (1) fails to capture the structured progression of user engagement entailed among different feedback and (2) embeds feedback-specific information into disjoint spaces, making representations incommensurable, increasing system complexity, and leading to suboptimal retrieval performance. A promising alternative is Ordinal Logistic Regression (OLR), which explicitly models discrete ordered relations. However, existing OLR-based recommendation models mainly focus on explicit feedback (e.g., movie ratings) and struggle with implicit, correlated feedback, where ordering is vague and non-linear. Moreover, standard OLR lacks flexibility in handling feedback-dependent covariates, resulting in suboptimal performance in real-world systems. To address these limitations, we propose Generalized Neural Ordinal Logistic Regression (GNOLR), which encodes multiple feature-feedback dependencies into a unified, structured embedding space and enforces feedback-specific dependency learning through a nested optimization framework. Thus, GNOLR enhances predictive accuracy, captures the progression of user engagement, and simplifies the retrieval process. We establish a theoretical comparison with existing paradigms, demonstrating how GNOLR avoids disjoint spaces while maintaining effectiveness. Extensive experiments on ten real-world datasets show that GNOLR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in efficiency and adaptability.
Abstract:Accurate hand pose estimation is vital in robotics, advancing dexterous manipulation in human-computer interaction. Toward this goal, this paper presents ReJSHand (which stands for Refined Joint and Skeleton Features), a cutting-edge network formulated for real-time hand pose estimation and mesh reconstruction. The proposed framework is designed to accurately predict 3D hand gestures under real-time constraints, which is essential for systems that demand agile and responsive hand motion tracking. The network's design prioritizes computational efficiency without compromising accuracy, a prerequisite for instantaneous robotic interactions. Specifically, ReJSHand comprises a 2D keypoint generator, a 3D keypoint generator, an expansion block, and a feature interaction block for meticulously reconstructing 3D hand poses from 2D imagery. In addition, the multi-head self-attention mechanism and a coordinate attention layer enhance feature representation, streamlining the creation of hand mesh vertices through sophisticated feature mapping and linear transformation. Regarding performance, comprehensive evaluations on the FreiHand dataset demonstrate ReJSHand's computational prowess. It achieves a frame rate of 72 frames per second while maintaining a PA-MPJPE (Position-Accurate Mean Per Joint Position Error) of 6.3 mm and a PA-MPVPE (Position-Accurate Mean Per Vertex Position Error) of 6.4 mm. Moreover, our model reaches scores of 0.756 for F@05 and 0.984 for F@15, surpassing modern pipelines and solidifying its position at the forefront of robotic hand pose estimators. To facilitate future studies, we provide our source code at ~\url{https://github.com/daishipeng/ReJSHand}.




Abstract:Binary Spiking Neural Networks (BSNNs) inherit the eventdriven paradigm of SNNs, while also adopting the reduced storage burden of binarization techniques. These distinct advantages grant BSNNs lightweight and energy-efficient characteristics, rendering them ideal for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. However, due to the binary synaptic weights and non-differentiable spike function, effectively training BSNNs remains an open question. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the challenge for BSNN learning, namely the frequent weight sign flipping problem. To mitigate this issue, we propose an Adaptive Gradient Modulation Mechanism (AGMM), which is designed to reduce the frequency of weight sign flipping by adaptively adjusting the gradients during the learning process. The proposed AGMM can enable BSNNs to achieve faster convergence speed and higher accuracy, effectively narrowing the gap between BSNNs and their full-precision equivalents. We validate AGMM on both static and neuromorphic datasets, and results indicate that it achieves state-of-the-art results among BSNNs. This work substantially reduces storage demands and enhances SNNs' inherent energy efficiency, making them highly feasible for resource-constrained environments.