Graph-Loc: Robust Graph-Based LiDAR Pose Tracking with Compact Structural Map Priors under Low Observability and Occlusion

Map-based LiDAR pose tracking is essential for long-term autonomous operation, where onboard map priors need be compact for scalable storage and fast retrieval, while online observations are often partial, repetitive, and heavily occluded. We propose Graph-Loc, a graph-based localization framework that tracks the platform pose against compact structural map priors represented as a lightweight point-line graph. Such priors can be constructed from heterogeneous sources commonly available in practice, including polygon outlines vectorized from occupancy/grid maps and CAD/model/floor-plan layouts. For each incoming LiDAR scan, Graph-Loc extracts sparse point and line primitives to form an observation graph, retrieves a pose-conditioned visible subgraph via LiDAR ray simulation, and performs scan-to-map association through unbalanced optimal transport with a local graph-context regularizer. The unbalanced formulation relaxes mass conservation, improving robustness to missing, spurious, and fragmented structures under occlusion. To enhance stability in low-observability segments, we estimate information anisotropy from the refinement normal matrix and defer updates along weakly constrained directions until sufficient constraints reappear. Experiments on public benchmarks, controlled stress tests, and real-world deployments demonstrate accurate and stable tracking with KB-level priors from heterogeneous map sources, including under geometrically degenerate and sustained occlusion and in the presence of gradual scene changes.

CyIN: Cyclic Informative Latent Space for Bridging Complete and Incomplete Multimodal Learning

Multimodal machine learning, mimicking the human brain's ability to integrate various modalities has seen rapid growth. Most previous multimodal models are trained on perfectly paired multimodal input to reach optimal performance. In real-world deployments, however, the presence of modality is highly variable and unpredictable, causing the pre-trained models in suffering significant performance drops and fail to remain robust with dynamic missing modalities circumstances. In this paper, we present a novel Cyclic INformative Learning framework (CyIN) to bridge the gap between complete and incomplete multimodal learning. Specifically, we firstly build an informative latent space by adopting token- and label-level Information Bottleneck (IB) cyclically among various modalities. Capturing task-related features with variational approximation, the informative bottleneck latents are purified for more efficient cross-modal interaction and multimodal fusion. Moreover, to supplement the missing information caused by incomplete multimodal input, we propose cross-modal cyclic translation by reconstruct the missing modalities with the remained ones through forward and reverse propagation process. With the help of the extracted and reconstructed informative latents, CyIN succeeds in jointly optimizing complete and incomplete multimodal learning in one unified model. Extensive experiments on 4 multimodal datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in both complete and diverse incomplete scenarios.

From Prompt to Graph: Comparing LLM-Based Information Extraction Strategies in Domain-Specific Ontology Development

Ontologies are essential for structuring domain knowledge, improving accessibility, sharing, and reuse. However, traditional ontology construction relies on manual annotation and conventional natural language processing (NLP) techniques, making the process labour-intensive and costly, especially in specialised fields like casting manufacturing. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers new possibilities for automating knowledge extraction. This study investigates three LLM-based approaches, including pre-trained LLM-driven method, in-context learning (ICL) method and fine-tuning method to extract terms and relations from domain-specific texts using limited data. We compare their performances and use the best-performing method to build a casting ontology that validated by domian expert.

Dolphin-v2: Universal Document Parsing via Scalable Anchor Prompting

Document parsing has garnered widespread attention as vision-language models (VLMs) advance OCR capabilities. However, the field remains fragmented across dozens of specialized models with varying strengths, forcing users to navigate complex model selection and limiting system scalability. Moreover, existing two-stage approaches depend on axis-aligned bounding boxes for layout detection, failing to handle distorted or photographed documents effectively. To this end, we present Dolphin-v2, a two-stage document image parsing model that substantially improves upon the original Dolphin. In the first stage, Dolphin-v2 jointly performs document type classification (digital-born versus photographed) alongside layout analysis. For digital-born documents, it conducts finer-grained element detection with reading order prediction. In the second stage, we employ a hybrid parsing strategy: photographed documents are parsed holistically as complete pages to handle geometric distortions, while digital-born documents undergo element-wise parallel parsing guided by the detected layout anchors, enabling efficient content extraction. Compared with the original Dolphin, Dolphin-v2 introduces several crucial enhancements: (1) robust parsing of photographed documents via holistic page-level understanding, (2) finer-grained element detection (21 categories) with semantic attribute extraction such as author information and document metadata, and (3) code block recognition with indentation preservation, which existing systems typically lack. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted on DocPTBench, OmniDocBench, and our self-constructed RealDoc-160 benchmark. The results demonstrate substantial improvements: +14.78 points overall on the challenging OmniDocBench and 91% error reduction on photographed documents, while maintaining efficient inference through parallel processing.

DriveMamba: Task-Centric Scalable State Space Model for Efficient End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Recent advances towards End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) have been often devoted on integrating modular designs into a unified framework for joint optimization e.g. UniAD, which follow a sequential paradigm (i.e., perception-prediction-planning) based on separable Transformer decoders and rely on dense BEV features to encode scene representations. However, such manual ordering design can inevitably cause information loss and cumulative errors, lacking flexible and diverse relation modeling among different modules and sensors. Meanwhile, insufficient training of image backbone and quadratic-complexity of attention mechanism also hinder the scalability and efficiency of E2E-AD system to handle spatiotemporal input. To this end, we propose DriveMamba, a Task-Centric Scalable paradigm for efficient E2E-AD, which integrates dynamic task relation modeling, implicit view correspondence learning and long-term temporal fusion into a single-stage Unified Mamba decoder. Specifically, both extracted image features and expected task outputs are converted into token-level sparse representations in advance, which are then sorted by their instantiated positions in 3D space. The linear-complexity operator enables efficient long-context sequential token modeling to capture task-related inter-dependencies simultaneously. Additionally, a bidirectional trajectory-guided "local-to-global" scan method is designed to preserve spatial locality from ego-perspective, thus facilitating the ego-planning. Extensive experiments conducted on nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets demonstrate the superiority, generalizability and great efficiency of DriveMamba.

Correctness-Optimized Residual Activation Lens (CORAL): Transferrable and Calibration-Aware Inference-Time Steering

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit persistent miscalibration, especially after instruction tuning and preference alignment. Modified training objectives can improve calibration, but retraining is expensive. Inference-time steering offers a lightweight alternative, yet most existing methods optimize proxies for correctness rather than correctness itself. We introduce CORAL (Correctness-Optimized Residual Activation Lens), a regularized inference-time steering method that captures distributed correctness signals from model internal activations using weight-decay MLP probes. We evaluate CORAL across three 7B-parameter models and find that it consistently improves accuracy by 10\% and expected calibration error (ECE) by 50\% on average. We additionally demonstrate that these gains transfer without retraining to the complete published test sets of four held-out benchmarks (ARC-Challenge, HellaSwag, Math-MC, OpenBookQA), averaging 14\% accuracy improvements and 49\% ECE improvements. Our results support the hypothesis that distributed information in model internals can be extracted using regularized probes when individual neurons are insufficient. CORAL thus provides a compute-efficient, transferable, and calibration-aware approach to improve MCQA performance during inference.

Semantically Labelled Automata for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with LTL Instructions

We study multi-task reinforcement learning (RL), a setting in which an agent learns a single, universal policy capable of generalising to arbitrary, possibly unseen tasks. We consider tasks specified as linear temporal logic (LTL) formulae, which are commonly used in formal methods to specify properties of systems, and have recently been successfully adopted in RL. In this setting, we present a novel task embedding technique leveraging a new generation of semantic LTL-to-automata translations, originally developed for temporal synthesis. The resulting semantically labelled automata contain rich, structured information in each state that allow us to (i) compute the automaton efficiently on-the-fly, (ii) extract expressive task embeddings used to condition the policy, and (iii) naturally support full LTL. Experimental results in a variety of domains demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and is able to scale to complex specifications where existing methods fail.

LingLanMiDian: Systematic Evaluation of LLMs on TCM Knowledge and Clinical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are advancing rapidly in medical NLP, yet Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) with its distinctive ontology, terminology, and reasoning patterns requires domain-faithful evaluation. Existing TCM benchmarks are fragmented in coverage and scale and rely on non-unified or generation-heavy scoring that hinders fair comparison. We present the LingLanMiDian (LingLan) benchmark, a large-scale, expert-curated, multi-task suite that unifies evaluation across knowledge recall, multi-hop reasoning, information extraction, and real-world clinical decision-making. LingLan introduces a consistent metric design, a synonym-tolerant protocol for clinical labels, a per-dataset 400-item Hard subset, and a reframing of diagnosis and treatment recommendation into single-choice decision recognition. We conduct comprehensive, zero-shot evaluations on 14 leading open-source and proprietary LLMs, providing a unified perspective on their strengths and limitations in TCM commonsense knowledge understanding, reasoning, and clinical decision support; critically, the evaluation on Hard subset reveals a substantial gap between current models and human experts in TCM-specialized reasoning. By bridging fundamental knowledge and applied reasoning through standardized evaluation, LingLan establishes a unified, quantitative, and extensible foundation for advancing TCM LLMs and domain-specific medical AI research. All evaluation data and code are available at https://github.com/TCMAI-BJTU/LingLan and http://tcmnlp.com.

ES-MemEval: Benchmarking Conversational Agents on Personalized Long-Term Emotional Support

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential as conversational agents. Yet, their effectiveness remains limited by deficiencies in robust long-term memory, particularly in complex, long-term web-based services such as online emotional support. However, existing long-term dialogue benchmarks primarily focus on static and explicit fact retrieval, failing to evaluate agents in critical scenarios where user information is dispersed, implicit, and continuously evolving. To address this gap, we introduce ES-MemEval, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates five core memory capabilities: information extraction, temporal reasoning, conflict detection, abstention, and user modeling, in long-term emotional support settings, covering question answering, summarization, and dialogue generation tasks. To support the benchmark, we also propose EvoEmo, a multi-session dataset for personalized long-term emotional support that captures fragmented, implicit user disclosures and evolving user states. Extensive experiments on open-source long-context, commercial, and retrieval-augmented (RAG) LLMs show that explicit long-term memory is essential for reducing hallucinations and enabling effective personalization. At the same time, RAG improves factual consistency but struggles with temporal dynamics and evolving user states. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of current paradigms and motivate more robust integration of memory and retrieval for long-term personalized dialogue systems.

Disentangled Instrumental Variables for Causal Inference with Networked Observational Data

Instrumental variables (IVs) are crucial for addressing unobservable confounders, yet their stringent exogeneity assumptions pose significant challenges in networked data. Existing methods typically rely on modelling neighbour information when recovering IVs, thereby inevitably mixing shared environment-induced endogenous correlations and individual-specific exogenous variation, leading the resulting IVs to inherit dependence on unobserved confounders and to violate exogeneity. To overcome this challenge, we propose $\underline{Dis}$entangled $\underline{I}$nstrumental $\underline{V}$ariables (DisIV) framework, a novel method for causal inference based on networked observational data with latent confounders. DisIV exploits network homogeneity as an inductive bias and employs a structural disentanglement mechanism to extract individual-specific components that serve as latent IVs. The causal validity of the extracted IVs is constrained through explicit orthogonality and exclusion conditions. Extensive semi-synthetic experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DisIV consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in causal effect estimation under network-induced confounding.