MiCU: End-to-End Smart Home Command Understanding with Large Language Model

Command understanding systems in smart home ecosystems can automate device control and substantially improve user experience. However, while they perform well on precise utterances (e.g., "turn on the bedroom light"), they struggle with ambiguous or misaligned commands (e.g., "make the bedroom cozy"). Large language models (LLMs) generalize well across various domains and can outperform traditional rule-based systems on such tasks, but their effectiveness is often constrained by scarce domain-specific data, insufficient task-specific adaptation, and high computational costs. In this paper, we propose an automated training data synthesis workflow using user logs and LLMs; then we build MiCU, a domain-specific LLM that excels at command understanding. Specifically, we employ curriculum learning to inject domain knowledge into the base LLM, then we enhance its reasoning ability via cold-start training combined with reinforcement learning (RL) guided by domain-specific thinking rules. Additionally, we introduce a token compression technique that condenses device description into a single special token, substantially reducing inference overhead and enabling \model-fast, an efficient variant optimized for long inputs. Extensive experiments show that MiCU significantly outperforms baselines, with an average accuracy gain of 20.01% across all device categories. We have deployed MiCU in the Xiaomi Home app, receiving approximately 1.7 million page views per day. Production evaluations show that MiCU reduces user correction rate by 1.57% and increases human audited accuracy by 32.05%. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/xiaomi-research/iot_spec_llm

Rethinking Stepwise Model Routing: A Cost-Efficient Table Reasoning Perspective

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on table reasoning tasks but incur substantial inference cost due to long reasoning traces. Stepwise model routing mitigates this issue by dynamically assigning reasoning steps to smaller or larger models. However, stepwise model routing for table reasoning remains underexplored. Through empirical analysis, we find that reasoning steps involving tables contain two types of tokens with distinct uncertainty distributions: table tokens grounded in table structure, such as cell values and headers, and text tokens representing surrounding natural-language reasoning. The uncertainty of both token types is correlated with the risk that the model makes an error in the next reasoning step. However, existing methods fail to model them separately, leading to suboptimal routing decisions. To address this, we propose EcoTab, a table-aware stepwise routing framework for efficient table reasoning. At each reasoning step, EcoTab separately estimates the uncertainties of table tokens and text tokens, maps them to next-step failure risks for the small model, and combines the two risks for routing. Experiments on multiple table reasoning benchmarks show that EcoTab consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves a better balance between accuracy and efficiency.

On the Trainability of Masked Diffusion Language Models via Blockwise Locality

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), yet their optimization can be substantially less stable. We study blockwise MDMs and compare them with AR-LLMs on three controlled tasks that stress different aspects of structured generation: in-context linear regression, graph path-finding, and Sudoku solving. We find that standard random-masking MDMs fail to reliably learn linear regression, exhibit high variance training dynamics on graph path-finding, while outperforming AR-LLMs on Sudoku. To mitigate these instabilities, we propose two locality aware blockwise models, namely Jigsaw and Scatter, that inject left-to-right inductive bias by enforcing autoregressive locality within blocks while preserving iterative refinement at the block level. Empirically, Jigsaw matches AR-LLM stability on linear regression and remains strong on Sudoku, while Scatter retains diffusion's planning advantage on path-finding. Our results indicate that standard random-masking MDMs, even with blockwise variants, may be a suboptimal instantiation of diffusion LMs for ordered generation, motivating models beyond random masking.

VoxSafeBench: Not Just What Is Said, but Who, How, and Where

As speech language models (SLMs) transition from personal devices into shared, multi-user environments, their responses must account for far more than the words alone. Who is speaking, how they sound, and where the conversation takes place can each turn an otherwise benign request into one that is unsafe, unfair, or privacy-violating. Existing benchmarks, however, largely focus on basic audio comprehension, study individual risks in isolation, or conflate content that is inherently harmful with content that only becomes problematic due to its acoustic context. We introduce VoxSafeBench, among the first benchmarks to jointly evaluate social alignment in SLMs across three dimensions: safety, fairness, and privacy. VoxSafeBench adopts a Two-Tier design: Tier1 evaluates content-centric risks using matched text and audio inputs, while Tier2 targets audio-conditioned risks in which the transcript is benign but the appropriate response hinges on the speaker, paralinguistic cues, or the surrounding environment. To validate Tier2, we include intermediate perception probes and confirm that frontier SLMs can successfully detect these acoustic cues yet still fail to act on them appropriately. Across 22 tasks with bilingual coverage, we find that safeguards appearing robust on text often degrade in speech: safety awareness drops for speaker- and scene-conditioned risks, fairness erodes when demographic differences are conveyed vocally, and privacy protections falter when contextual cues arrive acoustically. Together, these results expose a pervasive speech grounding gap: current SLMs frequently recognize the relevant social norm in text but fail to apply it when the decisive cue must be grounded in speech. Code and data are publicly available at: https://amphionteam.github.io/VoxSafeBench_demopage/

MimicLM: Zero-Shot Voice Imitation through Autoregressive Modeling of Pseudo-Parallel Speech Corpora

Voice imitation aims to transform source speech to match a reference speaker's timbre and speaking style while preserving linguistic content. A straightforward approach is to train on triplets of (source, reference, target), where source and target share the same content but target matches the reference's voice characteristics, yet such data is extremely scarce. Existing approaches either employ carefully designed disentanglement architectures to bypass this data scarcity or leverage external systems to synthesize pseudo-parallel training data. However, the former requires intricate model design, and the latter faces a quality ceiling when synthetic speech is used as training targets. To address these limitations, we propose MimicLM, which takes a novel approach by using synthetic speech as training sources while retaining real recordings as targets. This design enables the model to learn directly from real speech distributions, breaking the synthetic quality ceiling. Building on this data construction approach, we incorporate interleaved text-audio modeling to guide the generation of content-accurate speech and apply post-training with preference alignment to mitigate the inherent distributional mismatch when training on synthetic data. Experiments demonstrate that MimicLM achieves superior voice imitation quality with a simple yet effective architecture, significantly outperforming existing methods in naturalness while maintaining competitive similarity scores across speaker identity, accent, and emotion dimensions.

Multi-Faceted Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding for Semantic-Aware Link Prediction

Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding (CKGE) aims to continually learn embeddings for new knowledge, i.e., entities and relations, while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Most existing CKGE methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting via regularization or replaying old knowledge. They conflate new and old knowledge of an entity within the same embedding space to seek a balance between them. However, entities inherently exhibit multi-faceted semantics that evolve dynamically as their relational contexts change over time. A shared embedding fails to capture and distinguish these temporal semantic variations, degrading lifelong link prediction accuracy across snapshots. To address this, we propose a Multi-Faceted CKGE framework (MF-CKGE) for semantic-aware link prediction. During offline learning, MF-CKGE separates temporal old and new knowledge into distinct embedding spaces to prevent knowledge entanglement and employs semantic decoupling to reduce semantic redundancy, thereby improving space efficiency. During online inference, MF-CKGE adaptively identifies semantically query-relevant entity embeddings by quantifying their semantic importance, reducing interference from query-irrelevant noise. Experiments on eight datasets show that MF-CKGE achieves an average (maximum) improvement of 1.7% (2.7%) and 1.4% (3.8%) in MRR and Hits@10, respectively, over the best baseline. Our source code and datasets are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MF-CKGE-04E5.

NV-Bench: Benchmark of Nonverbal Vocalization Synthesis for Expressive Text-to-Speech Generation

While recent text-to-speech (TTS) systems increasingly integrate nonverbal vocalizations (NVs), their evaluations lack standardized metrics and reliable ground-truth references. To bridge this gap, we propose NV-Bench, the first benchmark grounded in a functional taxonomy that treats NVs as communicative acts rather than acoustic artifacts. NV-Bench comprises 1,651 multi-lingual, in-the-wild utterances with paired human reference audio, balanced across 14 NV categories. We introduce a dual-dimensional evaluation protocol: (1) Instruction Alignment, utilizing the proposed paralinguistic character error rate (PCER) to assess controllability, (2) Acoustic Fidelity, measuring the distributional gap to real recordings to assess acoustic realism. We evaluate diverse TTS models and develop two baselines. Experimental results demonstrate a strong correlation between our objective metrics and human perception, establishing NV-Bench as a standardized evaluation framework.

End-to-End Semantic ID Generation for Generative Advertisement Recommendation

Generative Recommendation (GR) has excelled by framing recommendation as next-token prediction. This paradigm relies on Semantic IDs (SIDs) to tokenize large-scale items into discrete sequences. Existing GR approaches predominantly generate SIDs via Residual Quantization (RQ), where items are encoded into embeddings and then quantized to discrete SIDs. However, this paradigm suffers from inherent limitations: 1) Objective misalignment and semantic degradation stemming from the two-stage compression; 2) Error accumulation inherent in the structure of RQ. To address these limitations, we propose UniSID, a Unified SID generation framework for generative advertisement recommendation. Specifically, we jointly optimize embeddings and SIDs in an end-to-end manner from raw advertising data, enabling semantic information to flow directly into the SID space and thus addressing the inherent limitations of the two-stage cascading compression paradigm. To capture fine-grained semantics, a multi-granularity contrastive learning strategy is introduced to align distinct items across SID levels. Finally, a summary-based ad reconstruction mechanism is proposed to encourage SIDs to capture high-level semantic information that is not explicitly present in advertising contexts. Experiments demonstrate that UniSID consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SID generation methods, yielding up to a 4.62% improvement in Hit Rate metrics across downstream advertising scenarios compared to the strongest baseline.

FedMosaic: Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Parametric Adapters

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding generation in external knowledge to improve factuality and reduce hallucinations. Yet most deployments assume a centralized corpus, which is infeasible in privacy aware domains where knowledge remains siloed. This motivates federated RAG (FedRAG), where a central LLM server collaborates with distributed silos without sharing raw documents. In context RAG violates this requirement by transmitting verbatim documents, whereas parametric RAG encodes documents into lightweight adapters that merge with a frozen LLM at inference, avoiding raw-text exchange. We adopt the parametric approach but face two unique challenges induced by FedRAG: high storage and communication from per-document adapters, and destructive aggregation caused by indiscriminately merging multiple adapters. We present FedMosaic, the first federated RAG framework built on parametric adapters. FedMosaic clusters semantically related documents into multi-document adapters with document-specific masks to reduce overhead while preserving specificity, and performs selective adapter aggregation to combine only relevance-aligned, nonconflicting adapters. Experiments show that FedMosaic achieves an average 10.9% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods in four categories, while lowering storage costs by 78.8% to 86.3% and communication costs by 91.4%, and never sharing raw documents.

VoxPrivacy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Interactional Privacy of Speech Language Models

As Speech Language Models (SLMs) transition from personal devices to shared, multi-user environments such as smart homes, a new challenge emerges: the model is expected to distinguish between users to manage information flow appropriately. Without this capability, an SLM could reveal one user's confidential schedule to another, a privacy failure we term interactional privacy. Thus, the ability to generate speaker-aware responses becomes essential for SLM safe deployment. Current SLM benchmarks test dialogue ability but overlook speaker identity. Multi-speaker benchmarks check who said what without assessing whether SLMs adapt their responses. Privacy benchmarks focus on globally sensitive data (e.g., bank passwords) while neglecting contextual privacy-sensitive information (e.g., a user's private appointment). To address this gap, we introduce VoxPrivacy, the first benchmark designed to evaluate interactional privacy in SLMs. VoxPrivacy spans three tiers of increasing difficulty, from following direct secrecy commands to proactively protecting privacy. Our evaluation of nine SLMs on a 32-hour bilingual dataset reveals a widespread vulnerability: most open-source models perform close to random chance (around 50% accuracy) on conditional privacy decisions, while even strong closed-source systems fall short on proactive privacy inference. We further validate these findings on Real-VoxPrivacy, a human-recorded subset, confirming that failures observed on synthetic data persist in real speech. Finally, we demonstrate a viable path forward: by fine-tuning on a new 4,000-hour training set, we improve privacy-preserving abilities while maintaining robustness. To support future work, we release the VoxPrivacy benchmark, the large-scale training set, and the fine-tuned model to foster the development of safer and more context-aware SLMs.