R3-RAG: Learning Step-by-Step Reasoning and Retrieval for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrates external knowledge with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance factual correctness and mitigate hallucination. However, dense retrievers often become the bottleneck of RAG systems due to their limited parameters compared to LLMs and their inability to perform step-by-step reasoning. While prompt-based iterative RAG attempts to address these limitations, it is constrained by human-designed workflows. To address these limitations, we propose $\textbf{R3-RAG}$, which uses $\textbf{R}$einforcement learning to make the LLM learn how to $\textbf{R}$eason and $\textbf{R}$etrieve step by step, thus retrieving comprehensive external knowledge and leading to correct answers. R3-RAG is divided into two stages. We first use cold start to make the model learn the manner of iteratively interleaving reasoning and retrieval. Then we use reinforcement learning to further harness its ability to better explore the external retrieval environment. Specifically, we propose two rewards for R3-RAG: 1) answer correctness for outcome reward, which judges whether the trajectory leads to a correct answer; 2) relevance-based document verification for process reward, encouraging the model to retrieve documents that are relevant to the user question, through which we can let the model learn how to iteratively reason and retrieve relevant documents to get the correct answer. Experimental results show that R3-RAG significantly outperforms baselines and can transfer well to different retrievers. We release R3-RAG at https://github.com/Yuan-Li-FNLP/R3-RAG.

OmniGenBench: A Modular Platform for Reproducible Genomic Foundation Models Benchmarking

The code of nature, embedded in DNA and RNA genomes since the origin of life, holds immense potential to impact both humans and ecosystems through genome modeling. Genomic Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a transformative approach to decoding the genome. As GFMs scale up and reshape the landscape of AI-driven genomics, the field faces an urgent need for rigorous and reproducible evaluation. We present OmniGenBench, a modular benchmarking platform designed to unify the data, model, benchmarking, and interpretability layers across GFMs. OmniGenBench enables standardized, one-command evaluation of any GFM across five benchmark suites, with seamless integration of over 31 open-source models. Through automated pipelines and community-extensible features, the platform addresses critical reproducibility challenges, including data transparency, model interoperability, benchmark fragmentation, and black-box interpretability. OmniGenBench aims to serve as foundational infrastructure for reproducible genomic AI research, accelerating trustworthy discovery and collaborative innovation in the era of genome-scale modeling.

VISTA: Enhancing Vision-Text Alignment in MLLMs via Cross-Modal Mutual Information Maximization

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a critical challenge in modality alignment, often exhibiting a bias towards textual information at the expense of other modalities like vision. This paper conducts a systematic information-theoretic analysis of the widely used cross-entropy loss in MLLMs, uncovering its implicit alignment objective. Our theoretical investigation reveals that this implicit objective has inherent limitations, leading to a degradation of cross-modal alignment as text sequence length increases, thereby hindering effective multimodal information fusion. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose Vision-Text Alignment (VISTA), a novel approach guided by our theoretical insights. VISTA introduces an explicit alignment objective designed to maximize cross-modal mutual information, preventing the degradation of visual alignment. Notably, VISTA enhances the visual understanding capabilities of existing MLLMs without requiring any additional trainable modules or extra training data, making it both efficient and practical. Our method significantly outperforms baseline models across more than a dozen benchmark datasets, including VQAv2, MMStar, and MME, paving the way for new directions in MLLM modal alignment research.

IM-Portrait: Learning 3D-aware Video Diffusion for Photorealistic Talking Heads from Monocular Videos

We propose a novel 3D-aware diffusion-based method for generating photorealistic talking head videos directly from a single identity image and explicit control signals (e.g., expressions). Our method generates Multiplane Images (MPIs) that ensure geometric consistency, making them ideal for immersive viewing experiences like binocular videos for VR headsets. Unlike existing methods that often require a separate stage or joint optimization to reconstruct a 3D representation (such as NeRF or 3D Gaussians), our approach directly generates the final output through a single denoising process, eliminating the need for post-processing steps to render novel views efficiently. To effectively learn from monocular videos, we introduce a training mechanism that reconstructs the output MPI randomly in either the target or the reference camera space. This approach enables the model to simultaneously learn sharp image details and underlying 3D information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves competitive avatar quality and novel-view rendering capabilities, even without explicit 3D reconstruction or high-quality multi-view training data.

HiScene: Creating Hierarchical 3D Scenes with Isometric View Generation

Scene-level 3D generation represents a critical frontier in multimedia and computer graphics, yet existing approaches either suffer from limited object categories or lack editing flexibility for interactive applications. In this paper, we present HiScene, a novel hierarchical framework that bridges the gap between 2D image generation and 3D object generation and delivers high-fidelity scenes with compositional identities and aesthetic scene content. Our key insight is treating scenes as hierarchical "objects" under isometric views, where a room functions as a complex object that can be further decomposed into manipulatable items. This hierarchical approach enables us to generate 3D content that aligns with 2D representations while maintaining compositional structure. To ensure completeness and spatial alignment of each decomposed instance, we develop a video-diffusion-based amodal completion technique that effectively handles occlusions and shadows between objects, and introduce shape prior injection to ensure spatial coherence within the scene. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces more natural object arrangements and complete object instances suitable for interactive applications, while maintaining physical plausibility and alignment with user inputs.

Embodied Neuromorphic Control Applied on a 7-DOF Robotic Manipulator

The development of artificial intelligence towards real-time interaction with the environment is a key aspect of embodied intelligence and robotics. Inverse dynamics is a fundamental robotics problem, which maps from joint space to torque space of robotic systems. Traditional methods for solving it rely on direct physical modeling of robots which is difficult or even impossible due to nonlinearity and external disturbance. Recently, data-based model-learning algorithms are adopted to address this issue. However, they often require manual parameter tuning and high computational costs. Neuromorphic computing is inherently suitable to process spatiotemporal features in robot motion control at extremely low costs. However, current research is still in its infancy: existing works control only low-degree-of-freedom systems and lack performance quantification and comparison. In this paper, we propose a neuromorphic control framework to control 7 degree-of-freedom robotic manipulators. We use Spiking Neural Network to leverage the spatiotemporal continuity of the motion data to improve control accuracy, and eliminate manual parameters tuning. We validated the algorithm on two robotic platforms, which reduces torque prediction error by at least 60% and performs a target position tracking task successfully. This work advances embodied neuromorphic control by one step forward from proof of concept to applications in complex real-world tasks.

CAGS: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding with Context-Aware Gaussian Splatting

Open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding is crucial for applications requiring natural language-driven spatial interpretation, such as robotics and augmented reality. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a powerful representation for scene reconstruction, integrating it with open-vocabulary frameworks reveals a key challenge: cross-view granularity inconsistency. This issue, stemming from 2D segmentation methods like SAM, results in inconsistent object segmentations across views (e.g., a "coffee set" segmented as a single entity in one view but as "cup + coffee + spoon" in another). Existing 3DGS-based methods often rely on isolated per-Gaussian feature learning, neglecting the spatial context needed for cohesive object reasoning, leading to fragmented representations. We propose Context-Aware Gaussian Splatting (CAGS), a novel framework that addresses this challenge by incorporating spatial context into 3DGS. CAGS constructs local graphs to propagate contextual features across Gaussians, reducing noise from inconsistent granularity, employs mask-centric contrastive learning to smooth SAM-derived features across views, and leverages a precomputation strategy to reduce computational cost by precomputing neighborhood relationships, enabling efficient training in large-scale scenes. By integrating spatial context, CAGS significantly improves 3D instance segmentation and reduces fragmentation errors on datasets like LERF-OVS and ScanNet, enabling robust language-guided 3D scene understanding.

RGL: A Graph-Centric, Modular Framework for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Graphs

Recent advances in graph learning have paved the way for innovative retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that leverage the inherent relational structures in graph data. However, many existing approaches suffer from rigid, fixed settings and significant engineering overhead, limiting their adaptability and scalability. Additionally, the RAG community has largely overlooked the decades of research in the graph database community regarding the efficient retrieval of interesting substructures on large-scale graphs. In this work, we introduce the RAG-on-Graphs Library (RGL), a modular framework that seamlessly integrates the complete RAG pipeline-from efficient graph indexing and dynamic node retrieval to subgraph construction, tokenization, and final generation-into a unified system. RGL addresses key challenges by supporting a variety of graph formats and integrating optimized implementations for essential components, achieving speedups of up to 143x compared to conventional methods. Moreover, its flexible utilities, such as dynamic node filtering, allow for rapid extraction of pertinent subgraphs while reducing token consumption. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that RGL not only accelerates the prototyping process but also enhances the performance and applicability of graph-based RAG systems across a range of tasks.

CADDreamer: CAD object Generation from Single-view Images

Diffusion-based 3D generation has made remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing 3D generative models often produce overly dense and unstructured meshes, which stand in stark contrast to the compact, structured, and sharply-edged Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models crafted by human designers. To address this gap, we introduce CADDreamer, a novel approach for generating boundary representations (B-rep) of CAD objects from a single image. CADDreamer employs a primitive-aware multi-view diffusion model that captures both local geometric details and high-level structural semantics during the generation process. By encoding primitive semantics into the color domain, the method leverages the strong priors of pre-trained diffusion models to align with well-defined primitives. This enables the inference of multi-view normal maps and semantic maps from a single image, facilitating the reconstruction of a mesh with primitive labels. Furthermore, we introduce geometric optimization techniques and topology-preserving extraction methods to mitigate noise and distortion in the generated primitives. These enhancements result in a complete and seamless B-rep of the CAD model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers high-quality CAD objects from single-view images. Compared to existing 3D generation techniques, the B-rep models produced by CADDreamer are compact in representation, clear in structure, sharp in edges, and watertight in topology.

Self-adaptive vision-language model for 3D segmentation of pulmonary artery and vein

Accurate segmentation of pulmonary structures iscrucial in clinical diagnosis, disease study, and treatment planning. Significant progress has been made in deep learning-based segmentation techniques, but most require much labeled data for training. Consequently, developing precise segmentation methods that demand fewer labeled datasets is paramount in medical image analysis. The emergence of pre-trained vision-language foundation models, such as CLIP, recently opened the door for universal computer vision tasks. Exploiting the generalization ability of these pre-trained foundation models on downstream tasks, such as segmentation, leads to unexpected performance with a relatively small amount of labeled data. However, exploring these models for pulmonary artery-vein segmentation is still limited. This paper proposes a novel framework called Language-guided self-adaptive Cross-Attention Fusion Framework. Our method adopts pre-trained CLIP as a strong feature extractor for generating the segmentation of 3D CT scans, while adaptively aggregating the cross-modality of text and image representations. We propose a s pecially designed adapter module to fine-tune pre-trained CLIP with a self-adaptive learning strategy to effectively fuse the two modalities of embeddings. We extensively validate our method on a local dataset, which is the largest pulmonary artery-vein CT dataset to date and consists of 718 labeled data in total. The experiments show that our method outperformed other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our data and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.