Resolving the bias-precision paradox with stochastic causal representation learning for personalized medicine

Estimating individualized treatment effects from longitudinal observational data is central to data-driven medicine, yet existing methods face a fundamental limitation: reducing confounding bias often suppresses clinically informative heterogeneity, degrading patient-specific predictions. Here, we identify this tension as a bias-precision paradox in causal representation learning and introduce sampling-based maximum mean discrepancy (sMMD), a stochastic alignment strategy that replaces global adversarial balancing with subset-level matching. We instantiate this approach in a framework for counterfactual outcome prediction with attribution-grounded interpretability. Across two large-scale ICU cohorts (n = 27,783), our framework improves accuracy under distribution shift, reducing error by up to 11.5% and substantially increasing recall in high-risk tasks. Mechanistic analyses show that sMMD selectively preserves clinically decisive variables. In human-AI evaluation, our method outperforms clinicians-in-training and large language models, and improves clinician accuracy by 14.7% while reducing decision time, enabling interpretable, real-time clinical decision support.

AdaGamma: State-Dependent Discounting for Temporal Adaptation in Reinforcement Learning

The discount factor in reinforcement learning controls both the effective planning horizon and the strength of bootstrapping, yet most deep RL methods use a single fixed value across all states. While state-dependent discounting is conceptually appealing, naive deep actor--critic implementations can become unstable and degenerate toward TD-error collapse. We propose AdaGamma, a practical deep actor--critic method for state-dependent discounting that learns a state-dependent discount function together with a return-consistency objective to regularize the induced backup structure. On the theory side, we analyze the Bellman operator induced by state-dependent discounting and establish its basic well-posedness properties under suitable conditions. Empirically, AdaGamma integrates into both SAC and PPO, yielding consistent improvements on continuous-control benchmarks, and achieves statistically significant gains in an online A/B test on the JD Logistics platform. These results suggest that state-dependent discounting can be made effective in deep RL when coupled with a return-consistency objective that prevents degenerate target manipulation.

Beyond Uniform Credit Assignment: Selective Eligibility Traces for RLVR

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a key approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, widely used critic-free algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) necessitate a ``uniform credit assignment'' assumption that indiscriminately broadcast trajectory-level advantages, hindering learning efficiency by failing to distinguish critical reasoning steps. To address this limitation, we propose Selective Eligibility Traces (S-trace). Grounded in the intuition of partial trust region preservation, we initially introduce P-trace as a sample-efficient, critic-free eligibility traces method, upon which we build S-trace, implementing a sparse eligibility traces mechanism to further mitigate variance and achieve fine-grained credit assignment by selectively masking low-entropy tokens. Theoretically, we contextualize the recent Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) method within the critic-free eligibility traces framework, identifying it as a special instance of the eligibility traces method operating under uniform credit assignment. Experiments demonstrate that S-trace not only outperforms GRPO, showing gains of 0.49\% on Qwen3-1.7B and 3.16\% on Qwen3-4B, and maintaining a robust 2.98\% improvement when scaled further to Qwen3-8B in average pass@16, but notably achieves this with simultaneously higher sample and token efficiency.

MAIC-UI: Making Interactive Courseware with Generative UI

Creating interactive STEM courseware traditionally requires HTML/CSS/JavaScript expertise, leaving barriers for educators. While generative AI can produce HTML codes, existing tools generate static presentations rather than interactive simulations, struggle with long documents, and lack pedagogical accuracy mechanisms. Furthermore, full regeneration for modifications requires 200--600 seconds, disrupting creative flow. We present MAIC-UI, a zero-code authoring system that enables educators to create and rapidly edit interactive courseware from textbooks, PPTs, and PDFs. MAIC-UI employs: (1) structured knowledge analysis with multi-modal understanding to ensure pedagogical rigor; (2) a two-stage generate-verify-optimize pipeline separating content alignment from visual refinement; and (3) Click-to-Locate editing with Unified Diff-based incremental generation achieving sub-10-second iteration cycles. A controlled lab study with 40 participants shows MAIC-UI reduces editing iterations (4.9 vs. 7.0) and significantly improves learnability and controllability compared to direct Text-to-HTML generation. A three-month classroom deployment with 53 high school students demonstrates that MAIC-UI fosters learning agency and reduces outcome disparities -- the pilot class achieved 9.21-point gains in STEM subjects compared to -2.32 points in control classes. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-MAIC/MAIC-UI.

X-Cache: Cross-Chunk Block Caching for Few-Step Autoregressive World Models Inference

Real-time world simulation is becoming a key infrastructure for scalable evaluation and online reinforcement learning of autonomous driving systems. Recent driving world models built on autoregressive video diffusion achieve high-fidelity, controllable multi-camera generation, but their inference cost remains a bottleneck for interactive deployment. However, existing diffusion caching methods are designed for offline video generation with multiple denoising steps, and do not transfer to this scenario. Few-step distilled models have no inter-step redundancy left for these methods to reuse, and sequence-level parallelization techniques require future conditioning that closed-loop interactive generation does not provide. We present X-Cache, a training-free acceleration method that caches along a different axis: across consecutive generation chunks rather than across denoising steps. X-Cache maintains per-block residual caches that persist across chunks, and applies a dual-metric gating mechanism over a structure- and action-aware block-input fingerprint to independently decide whether each block should recompute or reuse its cached residual. To prevent approximation errors from permanently contaminating the autoregressive KV cache, X-Cache identifies KV update chunks (the forward passes that write clean keys and values into the persistent cache) and unconditionally forces full computation on these chunks, cutting off error propagation. We implement X-Cache on X-world, a production multi-camera action-conditioned driving world model built on multi-block causal DiT with few-step denoising and rolling KV cache. X-Cache achieves 71% block skip rate with 2.6x wall-clock speedup while maintaining minimum degradation.

Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination via Phase-wise Self-reward

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) still struggle with vision hallucination, where generated responses are inconsistent with the visual input. Existing methods either rely on large-scale annotated data for fine-tuning, which incurs massive computational overhead, or employ static post-hoc strategies that overlook the dynamic nature of hallucination emergence. To address these, we introduce a new self-rewarding framework, enabling dynamic hallucination mitigation at inference time without external supervision. On the empirical side, we reveal that visual hallucination exhibits phase-wise dynamic patterns, peaking at the onset of each semantic phase. Drawing on these insights, we propose \textbf{PSRD} (\textbf{Phase-wise \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{R}eward \textbf{D}ecoding) for online hallucination correction guided by phase-wise self-reward signals. To reduce the cost of repeated self-evaluation during decoding, we distill the hallucination guidance signal from LVLMs into a lightweight reward model. The reward model subsequently provides on-the-fly guidance for targeted intervention during the decoding process, enabling precise hallucination suppression. The proposed PSRD significantly reduces the hallucination rate of LLaVA-1.5-7B by 50.0% and consistently outperforms existing post-hoc methods across five hallucination evaluation benchmarks for four LVLMs. Further analysis confirms that PSRD effectively mitigates hallucination propagation and achieves a highly controllable trade-off between strong performance and inference efficiency.

ReviewGrounder: Improving Review Substantiveness with Rubric-Guided, Tool-Integrated Agents

The rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support. However, LLM-based reviewers often generate superficial, formulaic comments lacking substantive, evidence-grounded feedback. We attribute this to the underutilization of two key components of human reviewing: explicit rubrics and contextual grounding in existing work. To address this, we introduce REVIEWBENCH, a benchmark evaluating review text according to paper-specific rubrics derived from official guidelines, the paper's content, and human-written reviews. We further propose REVIEWGROUNDER, a rubric-guided, tool-integrated multi-agent framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages, enriching shallow drafts via targeted evidence consolidation. Experiments on REVIEWBENCH show that REVIEWGROUNDER, using a Phi-4-14B-based drafter and a GPT-OSS-120B-based grounding stage, consistently outperforms baselines with substantially stronger/larger backbones (e.g., GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-R1-670B) in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions. The code is available \href{https://github.com/EigenTom/ReviewGrounder}{here}.

DIAURec: Dual-Intent Space Representation Optimization for Recommendation

General recommender systems deliver personalized services by learning user and item representations, with the central challenge being how to capture latent user preferences. However, representations derived from sparse interactions often fail to comprehensively characterize user behaviors, thereby limiting recommendation effectiveness. Recent studies attempt to enhance user representations through sophisticated modeling strategies ($e.g.,$ intent or language modeling). Nevertheless, most works primarily concentrate on model interpretability instead of representation optimization. This imbalance has led to limited progress, as representation optimization is crucial for recommendation quality by promoting the affinity between users and their interacted items in the feature space, yet remains largely overlooked. To overcome these limitations, we propose DIAURec, a novel representation learning framework that unifies intent and language modeling for recommendation. DIAURec reconstructs representations based on the prototype and distribution intent spaces formed by collaborative and language signals. Furthermore, we design a comprehensive representation optimization strategy. Specifically, we adopts alignment and uniformity as the primary optimization objectives, and incorporates both coarse- and fine-grained matching to achieve effective alignment across different spaces, thereby enhancing representational consistency. Additionally, we further introduce intra-space and interaction regularization to enhance model robustness and prevent representation collapse in reconstructed space representation. Experiments on three public datasets against fifteen baseline methods show that DIAURec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, fully validating its effectiveness and superiority.

Ψ-Map: Panoptic Surface Integrated Mapping Enables Real2Sim Transfer

Open-vocabulary panoptic reconstruction is essential for advanced robotics perception and simulation. However, existing methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) often struggle to simultaneously achieve geometric accuracy, coherent panoptic understanding, and real-time inference frequency in large-scale scenes. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework that integrates geometric reinforcement, end-to-end panoptic learning, and efficient rendering. First, to ensure physical realism in large-scale environments, we leverage LiDAR data to construct plane-constrained multimodal Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and employ 2D Gaussian surfels as the map representation, enabling high-precision surface alignment and continuous geometric supervision. Building upon this, to overcome the error accumulation and cumbersome cross-frame association inherent in traditional multi-stage panoptic segmentation pipelines, we design a query-guided end-to-end learning architecture. By utilizing a local cross-attention mechanism within the view frustum, the system lifts 2D mask features directly into 3D space, achieving globally consistent panoptic understanding. Finally, addressing the computational bottlenecks caused by high-dimensional semantic features, we introduce Precise Tile Intersection and a Top-K Hard Selection strategy to optimize the rendering pipeline. Experimental results demonstrate that our system achieves superior geometric and panoptic reconstruction quality in large-scale scenes while maintaining an inference rate exceeding 40 FPS, meeting the real-time requirements of robotic control loops.

Bidirectional Learning of Facial Action Units and Expressions via Structured Semantic Mapping across Heterogeneous Datasets

Facial action unit (AU) detection and facial expression (FE) recognition can be jointly viewed as affective facial behavior tasks, representing fine-grained muscular activations and coarse-grained holistic affective states, respectively. Despite their inherent semantic correlation, existing studies predominantly focus on knowledge transfer from AUs to FEs, while bidirectional learning remains insufficiently explored. In practice, this challenge is further compounded by heterogeneous data conditions, where AU and FE datasets differ in annotation paradigms (frame-level vs.\ clip-level), label granularity, and data availability and diversity, hindering effective joint learning. To address these issues, we propose a Structured Semantic Mapping (SSM) framework for bidirectional AU--FE learning under different data domains and heterogeneous supervision. SSM consists of three key components: (1) a shared visual backbone that learns unified facial representations from dynamic AU and FE videos; (2) semantic mediation via a Textual Semantic Prototype (TSP) module, which constructs structured semantic prototypes from fixed textual descriptions augmented with learnable context prompts, serving as supervision signals and cross-task alignment anchors in a shared semantic space; and (3) a Dynamic Prior Mapping (DPM) module that incorporates prior knowledge derived from the Facial Action Coding System and learns a data-driven association matrix in a high-level feature space, enabling explicit and bidirectional knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on popular AU detection and FE recognition benchmarks show that SSM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks simultaneously, and demonstrate that holistic expression semantics can in turn enhance fine-grained AU learning even across heterogeneous datasets.