Rethinking ANN-based Retrieval: Multifaceted Learnable Index for Large-scale Recommendation System

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search is widely used in the retrieval stage of large-scale recommendation systems. In this stage, candidate items are indexed using their learned embedding vectors, and ANN search is executed for each user (or item) query to retrieve a set of relevant items. However, ANN-based retrieval has two key limitations. First, item embeddings and their indices are typically learned in separate stages: indexing is often performed offline after embeddings are trained, which can yield suboptimal retrieval quality-especially for newly created items. Second, although ANN offers sublinear query time, it must still be run for every request, incurring substantial computation cost at industry scale. In this paper, we propose MultiFaceted Learnable Index (MFLI), a scalable, real-time retrieval paradigm that learns multifaceted item embeddings and indices within a unified framework and eliminates ANN search at serving time. Specifically, we construct a multifaceted hierarchical codebook via residual quantization of item embeddings and co-train the codebook with the embeddings. We further introduce an efficient multifaceted indexing structure and mechanisms that support real-time updates. At serving time, the learned hierarchical indices are used directly to identify relevant items, avoiding ANN search altogether. Extensive experiments on real-world data with billions of users show that MFLI improves recall on engagement tasks by up to 11.8\%, cold-content delivery by up to 57.29\%, and semantic relevance by 13.5\% compared with prior state-of-the-art methods. We also deploy MFLI in the system and report online experimental results demonstrating improved engagement, less popularity bias, and higher serving efficiency.

BindCLIP: A Unified Contrastive-Generative Representation Learning Framework for Virtual Screening

Virtual screening aims to efficiently identify active ligands from massive chemical libraries for a given target pocket. Recent CLIP-style models such as DrugCLIP enable scalable virtual screening by embedding pockets and ligands into a shared space. However, our analyses indicate that such representations can be insensitive to fine-grained binding interactions and may rely on shortcut correlations in training data, limiting their ability to rank ligands by true binding compatibility. To address these issues, we propose BindCLIP, a unified contrastive-generative representation learning framework for virtual screening. BindCLIP jointly trains pocket and ligand encoders using CLIP-style contrastive learning together with a pocket-conditioned diffusion objective for binding pose generation, so that pose-level supervision directly shapes the retrieval embedding space toward interaction-relevant features. To further mitigate shortcut reliance, we introduce hard-negative augmentation and a ligand-ligand anchoring regularizer that prevents representation collapse. Experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines. BindCLIP achieves substantial gains on challenging out-of-distribution virtual screening and improves ligand-analogue ranking on the FEP+ benchmark. Together, these results indicate that integrating generative, pose-level supervision with contrastive learning yields more interaction-aware embeddings and improves generalization in realistic screening settings, bringing virtual screening closer to real-world applicability.

CellMaster: Collaborative Cell Type Annotation in Single-Cell Analysis

Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) enables atlas-scale profiling of complex tissues, revealing rare lineages and transient states. Yet, assigning biologically valid cell identities remains a bottleneck because markers are tissue- and state-dependent, and novel states lack references. We present CellMaster, an AI agent that mimics expert practice for zero-shot cell-type annotation. Unlike existing automated tools, CellMaster leverages LLM-encoded knowledge (e.g., GPT-4o) to perform on-the-fly annotation with interpretable rationales, without pre-training or fixed marker databases. Across 9 datasets spanning 8 tissues, CellMaster improved accuracy by 7.1% over best-performing baselines (including CellTypist and scTab) in automatic mode. With human-in-the-loop refinement, this advantage increased to 18.6%, with a 22.1% gain on subtype populations. The system demonstrates particular strength in rare and novel cell states where baselines often fail. Source code and the web application are available at \href{https://github.com/AnonymousGym/CellMaster}{https://github.com/AnonymousGym/CellMaster}.

scPilot: Large Language Model Reasoning Toward Automated Single-Cell Analysis and Discovery

We present scPilot, the first systematic framework to practice omics-native reasoning: a large language model (LLM) converses in natural language while directly inspecting single-cell RNA-seq data and on-demand bioinformatics tools. scPilot converts core single-cell analyses, i.e., cell-type annotation, developmental-trajectory reconstruction, and transcription-factor targeting, into step-by-step reasoning problems that the model must solve, justify, and, when needed, revise with new evidence. To measure progress, we release scBench, a suite of 9 expertly curated datasets and graders that faithfully evaluate the omics-native reasoning capability of scPilot w.r.t various LLMs. Experiments with o1 show that iterative omics-native reasoning lifts average accuracy by 11% for cell-type annotation and Gemini-2.5-Pro cuts trajectory graph-edit distance by 30% versus one-shot prompting, while generating transparent reasoning traces explain marker gene ambiguity and regulatory logic. By grounding LLMs in raw omics data, scPilot enables auditable, interpretable, and diagnostically informative single-cell analyses. Code, data, and package are available at https://github.com/maitrix-org/scPilot

Uncertainty-Aware 4D Gaussian Splatting for Monocular Occluded Human Rendering

High-fidelity rendering of dynamic humans from monocular videos typically degrades catastrophically under occlusions. Existing solutions incorporate external priors-either hallucinating missing content via generative models, which induces severe temporal flickering, or imposing rigid geometric heuristics that fail to capture diverse appearances. To this end, we reformulate the task as a Maximum A Posteriori estimation problem under heteroscedastic observation noise. In this paper, we propose U-4DGS, a framework integrating a Probabilistic Deformation Network and a Double Rasterization pipeline. This architecture renders pixel-aligned uncertainty maps that act as an adaptive gradient modulator, automatically attenuating artifacts from unreliable observations. Furthermore, to prevent geometric drift in regions lacking reliable visual cues, we enforce Confidence-Aware Regularizations, which leverage the learned uncertainty to selectively propagate spatial-temporal validity. Extensive experiments on ZJU-MoCap and OcMotion demonstrate that U-4DGS achieves SOTA rendering fidelity and robustness.

UV-M3TL: A Unified and Versatile Multimodal Multi-Task Learning Framework for Assistive Driving Perception

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) need to understand human driver behavior while perceiving their navigation context, but jointly learning these heterogeneous tasks would cause inter-task negative transfer and impair system performance. Here, we propose a Unified and Versatile Multimodal Multi-Task Learning (UV-M3TL) framework to simultaneously recognize driver behavior, driver emotion, vehicle behavior, and traffic context, while mitigating inter-task negative transfer. Our framework incorporates two core components: dual-branch spatial channel multimodal embedding (DB-SCME) and adaptive feature-decoupled multi-task loss (AFD-Loss). DB-SCME enhances cross-task knowledge transfer while mitigating task conflicts by employing a dual-branch structure to explicitly model salient task-shared and task-specific features. AFD-Loss improves the stability of joint optimization while guiding the model to learn diverse multi-task representations by introducing an adaptive weighting mechanism based on learning dynamics and feature decoupling constraints. We evaluate our method on the AIDE dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate that UV-M3TL achieves state-of-the-art performance across all four tasks. To further prove the versatility, we evaluate UV-M3TL on additional public multi-task perception benchmarks (BDD100K, CityScapes, NYUD-v2, and PASCAL-Context), where it consistently delivers strong performance across diverse task combinations, attaining state-of-the-art results on most tasks.

FIRE-Bench: Evaluating Agents on the Rediscovery of Scientific Insights

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) promise to accelerate scientific discovery end-to-end, but rigorously evaluating their capacity for verifiable discovery remains a central challenge. Existing benchmarks face a trade-off: they either heavily rely on LLM-as-judge evaluations of automatically generated research outputs or optimize convenient yet isolated performance metrics that provide coarse proxies for scientific insight. To address this gap, we introduce FIRE-Bench (Full-cycle Insight Rediscovery Evaluation), a benchmark that evaluates agents through the rediscovery of established findings from recent, high-impact machine learning research. Agents are given only a high-level research question extracted from a published, verified study and must autonomously explore ideas, design experiments, implement code, execute their plans, and derive conclusions supported by empirical evidence. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art agents with frontier LLMs backbones like gpt-5 on FIRE-Bench. Our results show that full-cycle scientific research remains challenging for current agent systems: even the strongest agents achieve limited rediscovery success (<50 F1), exhibit high variance across runs, and display recurring failure modes in experimental design, execution, and evidence-based reasoning. FIRE-Bench provides a rigorous and diagnostic framework for measuring progress toward reliable agent-driven scientific discovery.

Learning Modal-Mixed Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Latent Embeddings

We study how to extend chain-of-thought (CoT) beyond language to better handle multimodal reasoning. While CoT helps LLMs and VLMs articulate intermediate steps, its text-only form often fails on vision-intensive problems where key intermediate states are inherently visual. We introduce modal-mixed CoT, which interleaves textual tokens with compact visual sketches represented as latent embeddings. To bridge the modality gap without eroding the original knowledge and capability of the VLM, we use the VLM itself as an encoder and train the language backbone to reconstruct its own intermediate vision embeddings, to guarantee the semantic alignment of the visual latent space. We further attach a diffusion-based latent decoder, invoked by a special control token and conditioned on hidden states from the VLM. In this way, the diffusion head carries fine-grained perceptual details while the VLM specifies high-level intent, which cleanly disentangles roles and reduces the optimization pressure of the VLM. Training proceeds in two stages: supervised fine-tuning on traces that interleave text and latents with a joint next-token and latent-reconstruction objective, followed by reinforcement learning that teaches when to switch modalities and how to compose long reasoning chains. Extensive experiments across 11 diverse multimodal reasoning tasks, demonstrate that our method yields better performance than language-only and other CoT methods. Our code will be publicly released.

NFCDS: A Plug-and-Play Noise Frequency-Controlled Diffusion Sampling Strategy for Image Restoration

Diffusion sampling-based Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods produce images with high perceptual quality but often suffer from reduced data fidelity, primarily due to the noise introduced during reverse diffusion. To address this trade-off, we propose Noise Frequency-Controlled Diffusion Sampling (NFCDS), a spectral modulation mechanism for reverse diffusion noise. We show that the fidelity-perception conflict can be fundamentally understood through noise frequency: low-frequency components induce blur and degrade fidelity, while high-frequency components drive detail generation. Based on this insight, we design a Fourier-domain filter that progressively suppresses low-frequency noise and preserves high-frequency content. This controlled refinement injects a data-consistency prior directly into sampling, enabling fast convergence to results that are both high-fidelity and perceptually convincing--without additional training. As a PnP module, NFCDS seamlessly integrates into existing diffusion-based restoration frameworks and improves the fidelity-perception balance across diverse zero-shot tasks.

Bridging Graph Structure and Knowledge-Guided Editing for Interpretable Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Temporal knowledge graph reasoning (TKGR) aims to predict future events by inferring missing entities with dynamic knowledge structures. Existing LLM-based reasoning methods prioritize contextual over structural relations, struggling to extract relevant subgraphs from dynamic graphs. This limits structural information understanding, leading to unstructured, hallucination-prone inferences especially with temporal inconsistencies. To address this problem, we propose IGETR (Integration of Graph and Editing-enhanced Temporal Reasoning), a hybrid reasoning framework that combines the structured temporal modeling capabilities of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with the contextual understanding of LLMs. IGETR operates through a three-stage pipeline. The first stage aims to ground the reasoning process in the actual data by identifying structurally and temporally coherent candidate paths through a temporal GNN, ensuring that inference starts from reliable graph-based evidence. The second stage introduces LLM-guided path editing to address logical and semantic inconsistencies, leveraging external knowledge to refine and enhance the initial paths. The final stage focuses on integrating the refined reasoning paths to produce predictions that are both accurate and interpretable. Experiments on standard TKG benchmarks show that IGETR achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines with relative improvements of up to 5.6% on Hits@1 and 8.1% on Hits@3 on the challenging ICEWS datasets. Additionally, we execute ablation studies and additional analyses confirm the effectiveness of each component.