LLM-based Text Simplification and its Effect on User Comprehension and Cognitive Load

Information on the web, such as scientific publications and Wikipedia, often surpasses users' reading level. To help address this, we used a self-refinement approach to develop a LLM capability for minimally lossy text simplification. To validate our approach, we conducted a randomized study involving 4563 participants and 31 texts spanning 6 broad subject areas: PubMed (biomedical scientific articles), biology, law, finance, literature/philosophy, and aerospace/computer science. Participants were randomized to viewing original or simplified texts in a subject area, and answered multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that tested their comprehension of the text. The participants were also asked to provide qualitative feedback such as task difficulty. Our results indicate that participants who read the simplified text answered more MCQs correctly than their counterparts who read the original text (3.9% absolute increase, p<0.05). This gain was most striking with PubMed (14.6%), while more moderate gains were observed for finance (5.5%), aerospace/computer science (3.8%) domains, and legal (3.5%). Notably, the results were robust to whether participants could refer back to the text while answering MCQs. The absolute accuracy decreased by up to ~9% for both original and simplified setups where participants could not refer back to the text, but the ~4% overall improvement persisted. Finally, participants' self-reported perceived ease based on a simplified NASA Task Load Index was greater for those who read the simplified text (absolute change on a 5-point scale 0.33, p<0.05). This randomized study, involving an order of magnitude more participants than prior works, demonstrates the potential of LLMs to make complex information easier to understand. Our work aims to enable a broader audience to better learn and make use of expert knowledge available on the web, improving information accessibility.

Exploiting Temporal State Space Sharing for Video Semantic Segmentation

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) plays a vital role in understanding the temporal evolution of scenes. Traditional methods often segment videos frame-by-frame or in a short temporal window, leading to limited temporal context, redundant computations, and heavy memory requirements. To this end, we introduce a Temporal Video State Space Sharing (TV3S) architecture to leverage Mamba state space models for temporal feature sharing. Our model features a selective gating mechanism that efficiently propagates relevant information across video frames, eliminating the need for a memory-heavy feature pool. By processing spatial patches independently and incorporating shifted operation, TV3S supports highly parallel computation in both training and inference stages, which reduces the delay in sequential state space processing and improves the scalability for long video sequences. Moreover, TV3S incorporates information from prior frames during inference, achieving long-range temporal coherence and superior adaptability to extended sequences. Evaluations on the VSPW and Cityscapes datasets reveal that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new standard for VSS with consistent results across long video sequences. By achieving a good balance between accuracy and efficiency, TV3S shows a significant advancement in spatiotemporal modeling, paving the way for efficient video analysis. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ashesham/TV3S.git.

Generalized Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Segmentation with Vision-Language Model

Generalized few-shot 3D point cloud segmentation (GFS-PCS) adapts models to new classes with few support samples while retaining base class segmentation. Existing GFS-PCS methods enhance prototypes via interacting with support or query features but remain limited by sparse knowledge from few-shot samples. Meanwhile, 3D vision-language models (3D VLMs), generalizing across open-world novel classes, contain rich but noisy novel class knowledge. In this work, we introduce a GFS-PCS framework that synergizes dense but noisy pseudo-labels from 3D VLMs with precise yet sparse few-shot samples to maximize the strengths of both, named GFS-VL. Specifically, we present a prototype-guided pseudo-label selection to filter low-quality regions, followed by an adaptive infilling strategy that combines knowledge from pseudo-label contexts and few-shot samples to adaptively label the filtered, unlabeled areas. Additionally, we design a novel-base mix strategy to embed few-shot samples into training scenes, preserving essential context for improved novel class learning. Moreover, recognizing the limited diversity in current GFS-PCS benchmarks, we introduce two challenging benchmarks with diverse novel classes for comprehensive generalization evaluation. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework across models and datasets. Our approach and benchmarks provide a solid foundation for advancing GFS-PCS in the real world. The code is at https://github.com/ZhaochongAn/GFS-VL

Passive Heart Rate Monitoring During Smartphone Use in Everyday Life

Resting heart rate (RHR) is an important biomarker of cardiovascular health and mortality, but tracking it longitudinally generally requires a wearable device, limiting its availability. We present PHRM, a deep learning system for passive heart rate (HR) and RHR measurements during everyday smartphone use, using facial video-based photoplethysmography. Our system was developed using 225,773 videos from 495 participants and validated on 185,970 videos from 205 participants in laboratory and free-living conditions, representing the largest validation study of its kind. Compared to reference electrocardiogram, PHRM achieved a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) < 10% for HR measurements across three skin tone groups of light, medium and dark pigmentation; MAPE for each skin tone group was non-inferior versus the others. Daily RHR measured by PHRM had a mean absolute error < 5 bpm compared to a wearable HR tracker, and was associated with known risk factors. These results highlight the potential of smartphones to enable passive and equitable heart health monitoring.

JUREX-4E: Juridical Expert-Annotated Four-Element Knowledge Base for Legal Reasoning

The Four-Element Theory is a fundamental framework in criminal law, defining the constitution of crime through four dimensions: Subject, Object, Subjective aspect, and Objective aspect. This theory is widely referenced in legal reasoning, and many Large Language Models (LLMs) attempt to incorporate it when handling legal tasks. However, current approaches rely on LLMs' internal knowledge to incorporate this theory, often lacking completeness and representativeness. To address this limitation, we introduce JUREX-4E, an expert-annotated knowledge base covering 155 criminal charges. It is structured through a progressive hierarchical annotation framework that prioritizes legal source validity and employs diverse legal interpretation methods to ensure comprehensiveness and authority. We evaluate JUREX-4E on the Similar Charge Distinction task and apply it to Legal Case Retrieval, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving LLM performance. Experimental results validate the high quality of JUREX-4E and its substantial impact on downstream legal tasks, underscoring its potential for advancing legal AI applications. Code: https://github.com/THUlawtech/JUREX

SyncDiff: Synchronized Motion Diffusion for Multi-Body Human-Object Interaction Synthesis

Synthesizing realistic human-object interaction motions is a critical problem in VR/AR and human animation. Unlike the commonly studied scenarios involving a single human or hand interacting with one object, we address a more generic multi-body setting with arbitrary numbers of humans, hands, and objects. This complexity introduces significant challenges in synchronizing motions due to the high correlations and mutual influences among bodies. To address these challenges, we introduce SyncDiff, a novel method for multi-body interaction synthesis using a synchronized motion diffusion strategy. SyncDiff employs a single diffusion model to capture the joint distribution of multi-body motions. To enhance motion fidelity, we propose a frequency-domain motion decomposition scheme. Additionally, we introduce a new set of alignment scores to emphasize the synchronization of different body motions. SyncDiff jointly optimizes both data sample likelihood and alignment likelihood through an explicit synchronization strategy. Extensive experiments across four datasets with various multi-body configurations demonstrate the superiority of SyncDiff over existing state-of-the-art motion synthesis methods.

Mimicking-Bench: A Benchmark for Generalizable Humanoid-Scene Interaction Learning via Human Mimicking

Learning generic skills for humanoid robots interacting with 3D scenes by mimicking human data is a key research challenge with significant implications for robotics and real-world applications. However, existing methodologies and benchmarks are constrained by the use of small-scale, manually collected demonstrations, lacking the general dataset and benchmark support necessary to explore scene geometry generalization effectively. To address this gap, we introduce Mimicking-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed for generalizable humanoid-scene interaction learning through mimicking large-scale human animation references. Mimicking-Bench includes six household full-body humanoid-scene interaction tasks, covering 11K diverse object shapes, along with 20K synthetic and 3K real-world human interaction skill references. We construct a complete humanoid skill learning pipeline and benchmark approaches for motion retargeting, motion tracking, imitation learning, and their various combinations. Extensive experiments highlight the value of human mimicking for skill learning, revealing key challenges and research directions.

ManiVideo: Generating Hand-Object Manipulation Video with Dexterous and Generalizable Grasping

In this paper, we introduce ManiVideo, a novel method for generating consistent and temporally coherent bimanual hand-object manipulation videos from given motion sequences of hands and objects. The core idea of ManiVideo is the construction of a multi-layer occlusion (MLO) representation that learns 3D occlusion relationships from occlusion-free normal maps and occlusion confidence maps. By embedding the MLO structure into the UNet in two forms, the model enhances the 3D consistency of dexterous hand-object manipulation. To further achieve the generalizable grasping of objects, we integrate Objaverse, a large-scale 3D object dataset, to address the scarcity of video data, thereby facilitating the learning of extensive object consistency. Additionally, we propose an innovative training strategy that effectively integrates multiple datasets, supporting downstream tasks such as human-centric hand-object manipulation video generation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach not only achieves video generation with plausible hand-object interaction and generalizable objects, but also outperforms existing SOTA methods.

Libri2Vox Dataset: Target Speaker Extraction with Diverse Speaker Conditions and Synthetic Data

Target speaker extraction (TSE) is essential in speech processing applications, particularly in scenarios with complex acoustic environments. Current TSE systems face challenges in limited data diversity and a lack of robustness in real-world conditions, primarily because they are trained on artificially mixed datasets with limited speaker variability and unrealistic noise profiles. To address these challenges, we propose Libri2Vox, a new dataset that combines clean target speech from the LibriTTS dataset with interference speech from the noisy VoxCeleb2 dataset, providing a large and diverse set of speakers under realistic noisy conditions. We also augment Libri2Vox with synthetic speakers generated using state-of-the-art speech generative models to enhance speaker diversity. Additionally, to further improve the effectiveness of incorporating synthetic data, curriculum learning is implemented to progressively train TSE models with increasing levels of difficulty. Extensive experiments across multiple TSE architectures reveal varying degrees of improvement, with SpeakerBeam demonstrating the most substantial gains: a 1.39 dB improvement in signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) on the Libri2Talker test set compared to baseline training. Building upon these results, we further enhanced performance through our speaker similarity-based curriculum learning approach with the Conformer architecture, achieving an additional 0.78 dB improvement over conventional random sampling methods in which data samples are randomly selected from the entire dataset. These results demonstrate the complementary benefits of diverse real-world data, synthetic speaker augmentation, and structured training strategies in building robust TSE systems.

Transferable and Forecastable User Targeting Foundation Model

User targeting, the process of selecting targeted users from a pool of candidates for non-expert marketers, has garnered substantial attention with the advancements in digital marketing. However, existing user targeting methods encounter two significant challenges: (i) Poor cross-domain and cross-scenario transferability and generalization, and (ii) Insufficient forecastability in real-world applications. These limitations hinder their applicability across diverse industrial scenarios. In this work, we propose FIND, an industrial-grade, transferable, and forecastable user targeting foundation model. To enhance cross-domain transferability, our framework integrates heterogeneous multi-scenario user data, aligning them with one-sentence targeting demand inputs through contrastive pre-training. For improved forecastability, the text description of each user is derived based on anticipated future behaviors, while user representations are constructed from historical information. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines in cross-domain, real-world user targeting scenarios, showcasing the superior capabilities of FIND. Moreover, our method has been successfully deployed on the Alipay platform and is widely utilized across various scenarios.