EndoCaver: Handling Fog, Blur and Glare in Endoscopic Images via Joint Deblurring-Segmentation

Endoscopic image analysis is vital for colorectal cancer screening, yet real-world conditions often suffer from lens fogging, motion blur, and specular highlights, which severely compromise automated polyp detection. We propose EndoCaver, a lightweight transformer with a unidirectional-guided dual-decoder architecture, enabling joint multi-task capability for image deblurring and segmentation while significantly reducing computational complexity and model parameters. Specifically, it integrates a Global Attention Module (GAM) for cross-scale aggregation, a Deblurring-Segmentation Aligner (DSA) to transfer restoration cues, and a cosine-based scheduler (LoCoS) for stable multi-task optimisation. Experiments on the Kvasir-SEG dataset show that EndoCaver achieves 0.922 Dice on clean data and 0.889 under severe image degradation, surpassing state-of-the-art methods while reducing model parameters by 90%. These results demonstrate its efficiency and robustness, making it well-suited for on-device clinical deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/ReaganWu/EndoCaver.

ScaleSim: Serving Large-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation with Invocation Distance-Based Memory Management

LLM-based multi-agent simulations are increasingly adopted across application domains, but remain difficult to scale due to GPU memory pressure. Each agent maintains private GPU-resident states, including models, prefix caches, and adapters, which quickly exhaust device memory as the agent count grows. We identify two key properties of these workloads: sparse agent activation and an estimable agent invocation order. Based on an analysis of representative workload classes, we introduce invocation distance, a unified abstraction that estimates the relative order in which agents will issue future LLM requests. Leveraging this abstraction, we present ScaleSim, a memory-efficient LLM serving system for large-scale multi-agent simulations. ScaleSim enables proactive prefetching and priority-based eviction, supports diverse agent-specific memory through a modular interface, and achieves up to 1.74x speedup over SGLang on simulation benchmarks.

From Classification to Ranking: Enhancing LLM Reasoning Capabilities for MBTI Personality Detection

Personality detection aims to measure an individual's corresponding personality traits through their social media posts. The advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer novel perspectives for personality detection tasks. Existing approaches enhance personality trait analysis by leveraging LLMs to extract semantic information from textual posts as prompts, followed by training classifiers for categorization. However, accurately classifying personality traits remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of human personality and subtle inter-trait distinctions. Moreover, prompt-based methods often exhibit excessive dependency on expert-crafted knowledge without autonomous pattern-learning capacity. To address these limitations, we view personality detection as a ranking task rather than a classification and propose a corresponding reinforcement learning training paradigm. First, we employ supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to establish personality trait ranking capabilities while enforcing standardized output formats, creating a robust initialization. Subsequently, we introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a specialized ranking-based reward function. Unlike verification tasks with definitive solutions, personality assessment involves subjective interpretations and blurred boundaries between trait categories. Our reward function explicitly addresses this challenge by training LLMs to learn optimal answer rankings. Comprehensive experiments have demonstrated that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple personality detection benchmarks.

VTONGuard: Automatic Detection and Authentication of AI-Generated Virtual Try-On Content

With the rapid advancement of generative AI, virtual try-on (VTON) systems are becoming increasingly common in e-commerce and digital entertainment. However, the growing realism of AI-generated try-on content raises pressing concerns about authenticity and responsible use. To address this, we present VTONGuard, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing over 775,000 real and synthetic try-on images. The dataset covers diverse real-world conditions, including variations in pose, background, and garment styles, and provides both authentic and manipulated examples. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a systematic evaluation of multiple detection paradigms under unified training and testing protocols. Our results reveal each method's strengths and weaknesses and highlight the persistent challenge of cross-paradigm generalization. To further advance detection, we design a multi-task framework that integrates auxiliary segmentation to enhance boundary-aware feature learning, achieving the best overall performance on VTONGuard. We expect this benchmark to enable fair comparisons, facilitate the development of more robust detection models, and promote the safe and responsible deployment of VTON technologies in practice.

Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini

Frontier language model capabilities are improving rapidly. We thus need stronger mitigations against bad actors misusing increasingly powerful systems. Prior work has shown that activation probes may be a promising misuse mitigation technique, but we identify a key remaining challenge: probes fail to generalize under important production distribution shifts. In particular, we find that the shift from short-context to long-context inputs is difficult for existing probe architectures. We propose several new probe architecture that handle this long-context distribution shift. We evaluate these probes in the cyber-offensive domain, testing their robustness against various production-relevant shifts, including multi-turn conversations, static jailbreaks, and adaptive red teaming. Our results demonstrate that while multimax addresses context length, a combination of architecture choice and training on diverse distributions is required for broad generalization. Additionally, we show that pairing probes with prompted classifiers achieves optimal accuracy at a low cost due to the computational efficiency of probes. These findings have informed the successful deployment of misuse mitigation probes in user-facing instances of Gemini, Google's frontier language model. Finally, we find early positive results using AlphaEvolve to automate improvements in both probe architecture search and adaptive red teaming, showing that automating some AI safety research is already possible.

Beyond Seen Bounds: Class-Centric Polarization for Single-Domain Generalized Deep Metric Learning

Single-domain generalized deep metric learning (SDG-DML) faces the dual challenge of both category and domain shifts during testing, limiting real-world applications. Therefore, aiming to learn better generalization ability on both unseen categories and domains is a realistic goal for the SDG-DML task. To deliver the aspiration, existing SDG-DML methods employ the domain expansion-equalization strategy to expand the source data and generate out-of-distribution samples. However, these methods rely on proxy-based expansion, which tends to generate samples clustered near class proxies, failing to simulate the broad and distant domain shifts encountered in practice. To alleviate the problem, we propose CenterPolar, a novel SDG-DML framework that dynamically expands and constrains domain distributions to learn a generalizable DML model for wider target domain distributions. Specifically, \textbf{CenterPolar} contains two collaborative class-centric polarization phases: (1) Class-Centric Centrifugal Expansion ($C^3E$) and (2) Class-Centric Centripetal Constraint ($C^4$). In the first phase, $C^3E$ drives the source domain distribution by shifting the source data away from class centroids using centrifugal expansion to generalize to more unseen domains. In the second phase, to consolidate domain-invariant class information for the generalization ability to unseen categories, $C^4$ pulls all seen and unseen samples toward their class centroids while enforcing inter-class separation via centripetal constraint. Extensive experimental results on widely used CUB-200-2011 Ext., Cars196 Ext., DomainNet, PACS, and Office-Home datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our CenterPolar over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released after acceptance.

Distribution-Aligned Sequence Distillation for Superior Long-CoT Reasoning

In this report, we introduce DASD-4B-Thinking, a lightweight yet highly capable, fully open-source reasoning model. It achieves SOTA performance among open-source models of comparable scale across challenging benchmarks in mathematics, scientific reasoning, and code generation -- even outperforming several larger models. We begin by critically reexamining a widely adopted distillation paradigm in the community: SFT on teacher-generated responses, also known as sequence-level distillation. Although a series of recent works following this scheme have demonstrated remarkable efficiency and strong empirical performance, they are primarily grounded in the SFT perspective. Consequently, these approaches focus predominantly on designing heuristic rules for SFT data filtering, while largely overlooking the core principle of distillation itself -- enabling the student model to learn the teacher's full output distribution so as to inherit its generalization capability. Specifically, we identify three critical limitations in current practice: i) Inadequate representation of the teacher's sequence-level distribution; ii) Misalignment between the teacher's output distribution and the student's learning capacity; and iii) Exposure bias arising from teacher-forced training versus autoregressive inference. In summary, these shortcomings reflect a systemic absence of explicit teacher-student interaction throughout the distillation process, leaving the essence of distillation underexploited. To address these issues, we propose several methodological innovations that collectively form an enhanced sequence-level distillation training pipeline. Remarkably, DASD-4B-Thinking obtains competitive results using only 448K training samples -- an order of magnitude fewer than those employed by most existing open-source efforts. To support community research, we publicly release our models and the training dataset.

Hidden States as Early Signals: Step-level Trace Evaluation and Pruning for Efficient Test-Time Scaling

Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling by generating multiple traces. However, the combination of lengthy reasoning traces with multiple sampling introduces substantial computation and high end-to-end latency. Prior work on accelerating this process has relied on similarity-based or confidence-based pruning, but these signals do not reliably indicate trace quality. To address these limitations, we propose STEP: Step-level Trace Evaluation and Pruning, a novel pruning framework that evaluates reasoning steps using hidden states and dynamically prunes unpromising traces during generation. We train a lightweight step scorer to estimate trace quality, and design a GPU memory-aware pruning strategy that triggers pruning as the GPU memory is saturated by KV cache to reduce end-to-end latency. Experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that STEP reduces end-to-end inference latency by 45%-70% on average compared to self-consistency while also improving reasoning accuracy. Our code is released at: https://github.com/Supercomputing-System-AI-Lab/STEP

The New Compiler Stack: A Survey on the Synergy of LLMs and Compilers

This survey has provided a systematic overview of the emerging field of LLM-enabled compilation by addressing several key research questions. We first answered how LLMs are being integrated by proposing a comprehensive, multi-dimensional taxonomy that categorizes works based on their Design Philosophy (Selector, Translator, Generator), LLM Methodology, their operational Level of Code Abstraction, and the specific Task Type they address. In answering what advancements these approaches offer, we identified three primary benefits: the democratization of compiler development, the discovery of novel optimization strategies, and the broadening of the compiler's traditional scope. Finally, in addressing the field's challenges and opportunities, we highlighted the critical hurdles of ensuring correctness and achieving scalability, while identifying the development of hybrid systems as the most promising path forward. By providing these answers, this survey serves as a foundational roadmap for researchers and practitioners, charting the course for a new generation of LLM-powered, intelligent, adaptive and synergistic compilation tools.

CREPES-X: Hierarchical Bearing-Distance-Inertial Direct Cooperative Relative Pose Estimation System

Relative localization is critical for cooperation in autonomous multi-robot systems. Existing approaches either rely on shared environmental features or inertial assumptions or suffer from non-line-of-sight degradation and outliers in complex environments. Robust and efficient fusion of inter-robot measurements such as bearings, distances, and inertials for tens of robots remains challenging. We present CREPES-X (Cooperative RElative Pose Estimation System with multiple eXtended features), a hierarchical relative localization framework that enhances speed, accuracy, and robustness under challenging conditions, without requiring any global information. CREPES-X starts with a compact hardware design: InfraRed (IR) LEDs, an IR camera, an ultra-wideband module, and an IMU housed in a cube no larger than 6cm on each side. Then CREPES-X implements a two-stage hierarchical estimator to meet different requirements, considering speed, accuracy, and robustness. First, we propose a single-frame relative estimator that provides instant relative poses for multi-robot setups through a closed-form solution and robust bearing outlier rejection. Then a multi-frame relative estimator is designed to offer accurate and robust relative states by exploring IMU pre-integration via robocentric relative kinematics with loosely- and tightly-coupled optimization. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of CREPES-X, showing robustness to up to 90% bearing outliers, proving resilience in challenging conditions, and achieving RMSE of 0.073m and 1.817° in real-world datasets.