SciCore-Mol: Augmenting Large Language Models with Pluggable Molecular Cognition Modules

Large Language Models (LLMs) are central to the one-for-all intelligent paradigm, but they face a fundamental challenge when dealing with heterogeneous scientific data such as molecules: the inherent gap between discrete linguistic symbols and topological molecular or continuous reaction data leads to significant information loss and semantic noise in text-based reasoning. We propose SciCore-Mol, a modular framework that bridges this gap through three deeply integrated pluggable cognitive modules: a topology-aware perception module, a latent diffusion-based molecular generation module, and a reaction-aware reasoning module. Each module is coupled to the LLM backbone through learned representation interfaces, enabling richer information exchange than is possible with text-only tool feedback. Our experiments on diverse chemical tasks demonstrate that SciCore-Mol achieves strong comprehensive performance across molecular understanding, generation, reaction prediction, and general chemistry knowledge, with an 8B-parameter open-source system that is competitive with and in several dimensions surpasses proprietary large models. This work provides a systematic blueprint for equipping LLMs with scientific expertise through decoupled, pluggable, and flexibly orchestrated modules, with direct implications for drug design, chemical synthesis, and broader scientific discovery.

PROVE: A Perceptual RemOVal cohErence Benchmark for Visual Media

Evaluating object removal in images and videos remains challenging because the task is inherently one-to-many, yet existing metrics frequently disagree with human perception. Full-reference metrics reward copy-paste behaviors over genuine erasure; no-reference metrics suffer from systematic biases such as favoring blurry results; and global temporal metrics are insensitive to localized artifacts within edited regions. To address these limitations, we propose RC (Removal Coherence), a pair of perception-aligned metrics: RC-S, which measures spatial coherence via sliding-window feature comparison between masked and background regions, and RC-T, which measures temporal consistency via distribution tracking within shared restored regions across adjacent frames. To validate RC and support community benchmarking, we further introduce PROVE-Bench, a two-tier real-world benchmark comprising PROVE-M, an 80-video paired dataset with motion augmentation, and PROVE-H, a 100-video challenging subset without ground truth. Together, RC metrics and PROVE-Bench form the PROVE (Perceptual RemOVal cohErence) evaluation framework for visual media. Experiments across diverse image and video benchmarks demonstrate that RC achieves substantially stronger alignment with human judgments than existing evaluation protocols. The code for RC metrics and PROVE-Bench are publicly available at: https://github.com/xiaomi-research/prove/.

Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly adopt action chunking, i.e., predicting and committing to a short horizon of consecutive low-level actions in a single forward pass, to amortize the inference cost of large-scale backbones and reduce per-step latency. However, committing these multi-step predictions to real-world execution requires balancing success rate against inference efficiency, a decision typically governed by fixed execution horizons tuned per task. Such heuristics ignore the state-dependent nature of predictive reliability, leading to brittle performance in dynamic or out-of-distribution settings. In this paper, we introduce A3, an Adaptive Action Acceptance mechanism that reframes dynamic execution commitment as a self-speculative prefix verification problem. A3 first computes a trajectory-wise consensus score of actions via group sampling, then selects a representative draft and prioritizes downstream verification. Specifically, it enforces: (1) consensus-ordered conditional invariance, which validates low-consensus actions by judging whether they remain consistent when re-decoded conditioned on high-consensus actions; and (2) prefix-closed sequential consistency, which guarantees physical rollout integrity by accepting only the longest continuous sequence of verified actions starting from the beginning. Consequently, the execution horizon emerges as the longest verifiable prefix satisfying both internal model logic and sequential execution constraints. Experiments across diverse VLA models and benchmarks demonstrate that A3 eliminates the need for manual horizon tuning while achieving a superior trade-off between execution robustness and inference throughput.

External Validation of Deep Learning Models for BI-RADS Breast Density Prediction from Ultrasound Images

We externally validated three deep learning models (DenseNet121, ViT-B/32, and ResNet50) for predicting mammographic breast density from breast ultrasound exams on an independent cohort. The external validation set comprised 2,000 ultrasound exams, including 500 cancer cases defined by an initial negative exam (BI-RADS 1 or 2) followed by a cancer diagnosis within 6 months to 10 years, and 1,500 negative controls matched by manufacturer and study year. Performance was measured using patient-level AUROC across four density categories: A (fatty), B (scattered), C (heterogeneous), and D (extremely dense). As a downstream assessment, we also evaluated 10-year risk prediction by incorporating age and AI-derived density into the Tyrer-Cuzick model and comparing performance against a reference model using age and mammography-reported density. All three models performed best in extremely dense breasts (AUROC 0.868-0.899), with strong performance in fatty (0.814-0.838) and scattered density (0.764-0.799), and lower performance in heterogeneously dense breasts (0.699-0.729). DenseNet121 achieved the highest overall performance (micro-averaged AUROC 0.885), and performance across categories was comparable between internal and external testing. For risk modeling, age combined with AI-derived density yielded a lower AUROC than age combined with mammography-reported density (0.541 vs. 0.570; p = 0.23), with no statistically significant difference. These findings indicate that deep learning models generalize well to external data with different racial composition for breast density assessment. While performance is strongest in extremely dense breasts, heterogeneously dense remains more challenging, highlighting the need for targeted optimization.

HeadRouter: Dynamic Head-Weight Routing for Task-Adaptive Audio Token Pruning in Large Audio Language Models

Recent large audio language models (LALMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in processing extended multi-modal sequences, yet incur high inference costs. Token compression is an effective method that directly reduces redundant tokens in the sequence. Existing compression methods usually assume that all attention heads in LALMs contribute equally to various audio tasks and calculate token importance by averaging scores across all heads. However, our analysis demonstrates that attention heads exhibit distinct behaviors across diverse audio domains. We further reveal that only a sparse subset of attention heads actively responds to audio, with completely different performance when handling semantic and acoustic tasks. In light of this observation, we propose HeadRouter, a head-importance-aware token pruning method that perceives the varying importance of attention heads in different audio tasks to maximize the retention of crucial tokens. HeadRouter is training-free and can be applied to various LALMs. Extensive experiments on the AudioMarathon and MMAU-Pro benchmarks demonstrate that HeadRouter achieves state-of-the-art compression performance, exceeding the baseline model even when retaining 70% of the audio tokens and achieving 101.8% and 103.0% of the vanilla average on Qwen2.5-Omni-3B and Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, respectively.

NaviRAG: Towards Active Knowledge Navigation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) typically relies on a flat retrieval paradigm that maps queries directly to static, isolated text segments. This approach struggles with more complex tasks that require the conditional retrieval and dynamic synthesis of information across different levels of granularity (e.g., from broad concepts to specific evidence). To bridge this gap, we introduce NaviRAG, a novel framework that shifts from passive segment retrieval to active knowledge navigation. NaviRAG first structures the knowledge documents into a hierarchical form, preserving semantic relationships from coarse-grained topics to fine-grained details. Leveraging this reorganized knowledge records, a large language model (LLM) agent actively navigates the records, iteratively identifying information gaps and retrieving relevant content from the most appropriate granularity level. Extensive experiments on long-document QA benchmarks show that NaviRAG consistently improves both retrieval recall and end-to-end answer performance over conventional RAG baselines. Ablation studies confirm performance gains stem from our method's capacity for multi-granular evidence localization and dynamic retrieval planning. We further discuss efficiency, applicable scenario, and future directions of our method, hoping to make RAG systems more intelligent and autonomous.

Perturb-and-Restore: Simulation-driven Structural Augmentation Framework for Imbalance Chromosomal Anomaly Detection

Detecting structural chromosomal abnormalities is crucial for accurate diagnosis and management of genetic disorders. However, collecting sufficient structural abnormality data is extremely challenging and costly in clinical practice, and not all abnormal types can be readily collected. As a result, deep learning approaches face significant performance degradation due to the severe imbalance and scarcity of abnormal chromosome data. To address this challenge, we propose a Perturb-and-Restore (P&R), a simulation-driven structural augmentation framework that effectively alleviates data imbalance in chromosome anomaly detection. The P&R framework comprises two key components: (1) Structure Perturbation and Restoration Simulation, which generates synthetic abnormal chromosomes by perturbing chromosomal banding patterns of normal chromosomes followed by a restoration diffusion network that reconstructs continuous chromosome content and edges, thus eliminating reliance on rare abnormal samples; and (2) Energy-guided Adaptive Sampling, an energy score-based online selection strategy that dynamically prioritizes high-quality synthetic samples by referencing the energy distribution of real samples. To evaluate our method, we construct a comprehensive structural anomaly dataset consisting of over 260,000 chromosome images, including 4,242 abnormal samples spanning 24 categories. Experimental results demonstrate that the P&R framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, surpassing existing methods with an average improvement of 8.92% in sensitivity, 8.89% in precision, and 13.79% in F1-score across all categories.

Self-Supervised Learning for Knee Osteoarthritis: Diagnostic Limitations and Prognostic Value of Uncurated Hospital Data

This study assesses whether self-supervised learning (SSL) improves knee osteoarthritis (OA) modeling for diagnosis and prognosis relative to ImageNet-pretrained initialization. We compared (i) image-only SSL pretrained on knee radiographs from the OAI, MOST, and NYU cohorts, and (ii) multimodal image-text SSL pretrained on uncurated hospital knee radiographs paired with radiologist impressions. For diagnostic Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grade prediction, SSL offered mixed results. While image-only SSL improved accuracy during linear probing (frozen encoder), it did not outperform ImageNet pretraining during full fine-tuning. Similarly, multimodal SSL failed to improve grading performance. We attribute this to severe bias in the uncurated hospital pretraining corpus (93% estimated KL grade 3), which limited alignment with the balanced diagnostic task. In contrast, this same multimodal initialization significantly improved prognostic modeling. It outperformed ImageNet baselines in predicting 4-year structural incidence and progression, including on external validation (MOST AUROC: 0.701 vs. 0.599 at 10% labeled data). Overall, while uncurated hospital image-text data may be ineffective for learning diagnosis due to severity bias, it provides a strong signal for prognostic modeling when the downstream task aligns with pretraining data distribution

From Ideal to Real: Stable Video Object Removal under Imperfect Conditions

Removing objects from videos remains difficult in the presence of real-world imperfections such as shadows, abrupt motion, and defective masks. Existing diffusion-based video inpainting models often struggle to maintain temporal stability and visual consistency under these challenges. We propose Stable Video Object Removal (SVOR), a robust framework that achieves shadow-free, flicker-free, and mask-defect-tolerant removal through three key designs: (1) Mask Union for Stable Erasure (MUSE), a windowed union strategy applied during temporal mask downsampling to preserve all target regions observed within each window, effectively handling abrupt motion and reducing missed removals; (2) Denoising-Aware Segmentation (DA-Seg), a lightweight segmentation head on a decoupled side branch equipped with Denoising-Aware AdaLN and trained with mask degradation to provide an internal diffusion-aware localization prior without affecting content generation; and (3) Curriculum Two-Stage Training: where Stage I performs self-supervised pretraining on unpaired real-background videos with online random masks to learn realistic background and temporal priors, and Stage II refines on synthetic pairs using mask degradation and side-effect-weighted losses, jointly removing objects and their associated shadows/reflections while improving cross-domain robustness. Extensive experiments show that SVOR attains new state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets and degraded-mask benchmarks, advancing video object removal from ideal settings toward real-world applications.

FastCode: Fast and Cost-Efficient Code Understanding and Reasoning

Repository-scale code reasoning is a cornerstone of modern AI-assisted software engineering, enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle complex workflows from program comprehension to complex debugging. However, balancing accuracy with context cost remains a significant bottleneck, as existing agentic approaches often waste computational resources through inefficient, iterative full-text exploration. To address this, we introduce FastCode, a framework that decouples repository exploration from content consumption. FastCode utilizes a structural scouting mechanism to navigate a lightweight semantic-structural map of the codebase, allowing the system to trace dependencies and pinpoint relevant targets without the overhead of full-text ingestion. By leveraging structure-aware navigation tools regulated by a cost-aware policy, the framework constructs high-value contexts in a single, optimized step. Extensive evaluations on the SWE-QA, LongCodeQA, LOC-BENCH, and GitTaskBench benchmarks demonstrate that FastCode consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in reasoning accuracy while significantly reducing token consumption, validating the efficiency of scouting-first strategies for large-scale code reasoning. Source code is available at https://github.com/HKUDS/FastCode.