MOF-Sleuth: Tool-Grounded Reward Alignment for Explainable Fine-Grained MOF CIF Auditing

Large metal-organic framework (MOF) databases support simulation, screening, and machine learning through crystallographic information files (CIFs). Subtle chemical and structural errors in these inputs can compromise downstream results and hinder manual inspection. LLM advances in computational chemistry offer paths beyond predictive screening toward fine-grained diagnosis with evidence-grounded explanations. However, two challenges remain: (i) limited fine-grained attribution: MOF-specific validators and machine-learning models scale detection but provide fixed checks, readiness scores, or coarse labels rather than evidence-grounded explanations; and (ii) unreliable CIF reasoning: direct LLM auditing is costly and unreliable because chemical evidence is implicit across atom-site records and requires geometric, connectivity, occupancy, and charge calculations. Both stem from weak coupling between chemical evidence and language-model explanation. We introduce MOF-Sleuth, a reinforcement-guided CIF auditing agent with two modules: a deterministic Forensic Lab and a Sleuth reasoning engine. The Lab derives composition, geometry, connectivity, occupancy, coordination, and charge evidence, and Sleuth uses this evidence to produce an evidence-grounded explanation, error types, and a binary decision. Reward-guided reinforcement learning (RL) turns tool measurements into chemical explanation-level supervision, rewarding not only the final answer but also cited chemical evidence and evidence-supported diagnoses. We introduce Chemically Grounded Diagnosis (Chem-GD), a metric that assesses whether a correct diagnosis is explained by factual, relevant CIF-derived evidence. Across four benchmarks, MOF-Sleuth establishes state-of-the-art performance among LLM-based approaches and MOF-specific machine-learning methods, demonstrating gains in detection, attribution, and grounded explanation quality.

Scene Graph Thinking: Reinforcing Structured Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong perception and reasoning capabilities. However, most existing models focus on isolated objects and neglect structured relationships for efficient target navigation, limiting their performance on visually intensive tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Scene Graph Thinking (SaGe), a novel paradigm that enables fine-grained and structured visual reasoning through explicit scene-graph representations. Specifically, we first introduce an automated data engine that converts flat image-text corpora into structured scene graphs, where hierarchical entities constitute the nodes and diverse visual relations define the edges. Building upon this, we construct 120K high-quality training data by sampling reasoning traces from scene graphs. Then, two-stage graph-aligned post-training paradigms are introduced, where supervised fine-tuning internalizes MLLMs with structured reasoning, and subsequent reinforcement fine-tuning proposes node-as-proxy graph rewards to consolidate efficient graph exploration. With curated data and graph-aligned training, our approach achieves significant improvements across eight multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating strong effectiveness on fine-grained perception and reasoning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zwyang6/SaGe.

When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting

A model can learn that the piano piece Für Elise is calm and reflective by listening to the audio or by reading a text description, but does it matter which route that knowledge took when it is later at risk of being forgotten? Forgetting research in multimodal models measures what knowledge is lost under adaptation, yet has not asked whether acquisition route affects how easily that knowledge is forgotten. We call this untested premise the Pathway-Invariant Assumption. Music understanding enables a clean test because a music clip and a canonical text description can be aligned to the same perceptual content, allowing the same knowledge unit to enter a model through listening or reading while the target remains fixed. Across multiple architecturally distinct audio-language models, we observe a consistent asymmetry: text-pathway knowledge is forgotten more than matched audio-pathway knowledge under identical adaptation pressure. To attribute this effect to route rather than confounds, we introduce the Paired Pathway Controlled Protocol (PPCP), a three-phase design that establishes matched pathway baselines, activates both pathways under symmetric supervision on the same knowledge pool, and applies identical forgetting pressure to both pathways. The gap is stable across models and gain-controlled analyses, persists when contradictory overwrite is replaced by correct-label cross-domain learning, remains under single-modality pressure, and is not removed by lightweight replay. Two independent routing-depth controls confirm that the effect is not explained by architectural depth, pointing to input representation as the dominant factor. Under PPCP, our results demonstrate that forgetting is highly route-dependent, establishing acquisition route as a new analytical dimension for forgetting research and multimodal system design.

ReasonLight: A Multimodal Foundation Model-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Traffic Signal Control

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in traffic signal control (TSC). However, its reliance on predefined states limits responsiveness to observable open-world events that are absent from training data. IoT-enabled intersections provide heterogeneous observations from roadside sensors and cameras, creating opportunities to improve RL adaptability to such events. To this end, we propose ReasonLight, a multimodal foundation model-enhanced RL framework for zero-shot TSC. ReasonLight integrates three sources of information: structured traffic measurements, multi-view camera observations, and candidate phase decisions from a pre-trained RL controller. Given an RL-proposed phase, ReasonLight extracts visual semantics from multi-view images and aligns them with compact sensor-derived scene descriptions. This alignment enables a semantic-guided refinement module to either preserve or adjust the proposed action according to traffic rules and event semantics. To ensure operational reliability, refined actions are constrained by the set of available phases. Any invalid decision is rejected, and the system falls back to the original RL action. We evaluate ReasonLight on two types of rare events not seen during RL training: emergency vehicle priority and temporary traffic regulation. Experimental results show that ReasonLight achieves zero-shot adaptation without retraining. It reduces emergency vehicle waiting time by up to 88.7% compared with the RL-only backbone while preserving comparable routine traffic performance.

DiCLIP: Diffusion Model Enhances CLIP's Dense Knowledge for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) with image-level labels typically leverages Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to achieve pixel-level predictions. Recently, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has been introduced to generate CAMs in WSSS. However, previous WSSS methods solely adopt CLIP's vision-language paired property for dense localization, neglecting its inherently limited dense knowledge across both visual and text modalities, which renders CAM generation suboptimal. In this work, we propose DiCLIP, a novel WSSS framework that leverages the generative diffusion model to enhance CLIP's dense knowledge across two modalities. Specifically, Visual Correlation Enhancement (VCE) and Text Semantic Augmentation (TSA) modules are proposed for dense prediction enhancement. To improve the spatial awareness of visual features, our VCE module utilizes diffusion's reliable spatial consistency to mitigate the over-smoothing issue in CLIP's attention. It designs the Attention Clustering Refinement (ACR) module to reliably extract diverse correlation maps from the diffusion model. The correlation maps act as a diversity bias for CLIP's self-attention, recursively pushing its visual features towards a more discriminative dense distribution. To augment the semantics of text embeddings, our TSA module argues that a single text modality is insufficient to encompass the variability of visual categories. Thus, we leverage diffusion's generative power to maintain a dynamic key-value cache model, shifting CAM generation from a patch-text matching mechanism to a novel visual knowledge retrieval paradigm. With these enhancements, DiCLIP not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO but also significantly reduces training costs. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zwyang6/DiCLIP.

Beyond Land Surface Temperature: Explainable Spatial Machine Learning Reveals Urban Morphology Effects on Human-Centric Heat Stress

Heat exposure connects the built environment and public health, directly shaping the livability and sustainability of urban areas. Understanding the spatial heterogeneity of heat exposure and its drivers is vital for climate-adaptive urban planning. However, most planning-oriented studies rely on land surface temperature (LST), and whether LST adequately represents human heat exposure and how it differs from physiologically relevant heat stress remains insufficiently examined. Here, adopting Landsat-retrieved 30-m LST and GPU-accelerated 1-m universal thermal climate index (UTCI) in Singapore, this study establishes a comprehensive "Modeling-Comparing-Assessing" framework to systematically evaluate the spatial and mechanistic discrepancies between the two metrics. We further investigate pronounced non-stationary and threshold-based quantitative relationships of the two metrics with urban factors by employing a novel geographically weighted XGBoost (GW-XGBoost) and generalized additive model (GAM) workflow. Our results demonstrate notable discrepancies in spatial patterns of LST and UTCI, along with substantial spatial heterogeneity in how 2D and 3D urban factors impact these two thermal metrics, as revealed by explainable GW-XGBoost models (global out-of-bag R2 = 0.855 for LST and 0.905 for UTCI, respectively). Crucially, spatially explicit SHAP interprets that sky view factor plays a central role in explaining UTCI variability but exhibits a comparatively marginal independent contribution to LST, indicating that LST inadequately captures shading-driven and radiative processes governing actual human heat stress. Notably, SHAP-GAM analysis indicates that higher albedo is associated with increased UTCI. These novel findings provide evidence for integrating physiologically relevant thermal indices to inform targeted heat risk management and climate-adaptive urban planning.

A Graph-Enhanced Defense Framework for Explainable Fake News Detection with LLM

Explainable fake news detection aims to assess the veracity of news claims while providing human-friendly explanations. Existing methods incorporating investigative journalism are often inefficient and struggle with breaking news. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable leveraging externally retrieved reports as evidence for detection and explanation generation, but unverified reports may introduce inaccuracies. Moreover, effective explainable fake news detection should provide a comprehensible explanation for all aspects of a claim to assist the public in verifying its accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a graph-enhanced defense framework (G-Defense) that provides fine-grained explanations based solely on unverified reports. Specifically, we construct a claim-centered graph by decomposing the news claim into several sub-claims and modeling their dependency relationships. For each sub-claim, we use the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique to retrieve salient evidence and generate competing explanations. We then introduce a defense-like inference module based on the graph to assess the overall veracity. Finally, we prompt an LLM to generate an intuitive explanation graph. Experimental results demonstrate that G-Defense achieves state-of-the-art performance in both veracity detection and the quality of its explanations.

Seeing Far and Clearly: Mitigating Hallucinations in MLLMs with Attention Causal Decoding

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly improved performance in visual question answering. However, they often suffer from hallucinations. In this work, hallucinations are categorized into two main types: initial hallucinations and snowball hallucinations. We argue that adequate contextual information can be extracted directly from the token interaction process. Inspired by causal inference in the decoding strategy, we propose to leverage causal masks to establish information propagation between multimodal tokens. The hypothesis is that insufficient interaction between those tokens may lead the model to rely on outlier tokens, overlooking dense and rich contextual cues. Therefore, we propose to intervene in the propagation process by tackling outlier tokens to enhance in-context inference. With this goal, we present FarSight, a versatile plug-and-play decoding strategy to reduce attention interference from outlier tokens merely by optimizing the causal mask. The heart of our method is effective token propagation. We design an attention register structure within the upper triangular matrix of the causal mask, dynamically allocating attention to capture attention diverted to outlier tokens. Moreover, a positional awareness encoding method with a diminishing masking rate is proposed, allowing the model to attend to further preceding tokens, especially for video sequence tasks. With extensive experiments, FarSight demonstrates significant hallucination-mitigating performance across different MLLMs on both image and video benchmarks, proving its effectiveness.

Efficient training for large-scale optical neural network using an evolutionary strategy and attention pruning

MZI-based block optical neural networks (BONNs), which can achieve large-scale network models, have increasingly drawn attentions. However, the robustness of the current training algorithm is not high enough. Moreover, large-scale BONNs usually contain numerous trainable parameters, resulting in expensive computation and power consumption. In this article, by pruning matrix blocks and directly optimizing the individuals in population, we propose an on-chip covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy and attention-based pruning (CAP) algorithm for large-scale BONNs. The calculated results demonstrate that the CAP algorithm can prune 60% and 80% of the parameters for MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, respectively, while only degrades the performance by 3.289% and 4.693%. Considering the influence of dynamic noise in phase shifters, our proposed CAP algorithm (performance degradation of 22.327% for MNIST dataset and 24.019% for Fashion-MNIST dataset utilizing a poor fabricated chip and electrical control with a standard deviation of 0.5) exhibits strongest robustness compared with both our previously reported block adjoint training algorithm (43.963% and 41.074%) and the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (25.757% and 32.871%), respectively. Moreover, when 60% of the parameters are pruned, the CAP algorithm realizes 88.5% accuracy in experiment for the simplified MNIST dataset, which is similar to the simulation result without noise (92.1%). Additionally, we simulationally and experimentally demonstrate that using MZIs with only internal phase shifters to construct BONNs is an efficient way to reduce both the system area and the required trainable parameters. Notably, our proposed CAP algorithm show excellent potential for larger-scale network models and more complex tasks.

SlowFastVAD: Video Anomaly Detection via Integrating Simple Detector and RAG-Enhanced Vision-Language Model

Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims to identify unexpected events in videos and has wide applications in safety-critical domains. While semi-supervised methods trained on only normal samples have gained traction, they often suffer from high false alarm rates and poor interpretability. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, offering new opportunities for explainable anomaly detection. However, their high computational cost and lack of domain adaptation hinder real-time deployment and reliability. Inspired by dual complementary pathways in human visual perception, we propose SlowFastVAD, a hybrid framework that integrates a fast anomaly detector with a slow anomaly detector (namely a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) enhanced VLM), to address these limitations. Specifically, the fast detector first provides coarse anomaly confidence scores, and only a small subset of ambiguous segments, rather than the entire video, is further analyzed by the slower yet more interpretable VLM for elaborate detection and reasoning. Furthermore, to adapt VLMs to domain-specific VAD scenarios, we construct a knowledge base including normal patterns based on few normal samples and abnormal patterns inferred by VLMs. During inference, relevant patterns are retrieved and used to augment prompts for anomaly reasoning. Finally, we smoothly fuse the anomaly confidence of fast and slow detectors to enhance robustness of anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that SlowFastVAD effectively combines the strengths of both fast and slow detectors, and achieves remarkable detection accuracy and interpretability with significantly reduced computational overhead, making it well-suited for real-world VAD applications with high reliability requirements.