Current Large Language Models (LLMs) often undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to acquire tool use capabilities. However, SFT struggles to generalize to unfamiliar or complex tool use scenarios. Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly with R1-like models, have demonstrated promising reasoning and generalization abilities. Yet, reward design for tool use presents unique challenges: multiple tools may be invoked with diverse parameters, and coarse-grained reward signals, such as answer matching, fail to offer the finegrained feedback required for effective learning. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study on reward design for tool selection and application tasks within the RL paradigm. We systematically explore a wide range of reward strategies, analyzing their types, scales, granularity, and temporal dynamics. Building on these insights, we propose a principled reward design tailored for tool use tasks and apply it to train LLMs using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Empirical evaluations across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach yields robust, scalable, and stable training, achieving a 17% improvement over base models and a 15% gain over SFT models. These results highlight the critical role of thoughtful reward design in enhancing the tool use capabilities and generalization performance of LLMs. All the codes are released to facilitate future research.

Modern society is full of computational challenges that rely on probabilistic reasoning, statistics, and combinatorics. Interestingly, many of these questions can be formulated by encoding them into propositional formulas and then asking for its number of models. With a growing interest in practical problem-solving for tasks that involve model counting, the community established the Model Counting (MC) Competition in fall of 2019 with its first iteration in 2020. The competition aims at advancing applications, identifying challenging benchmarks, fostering new solver development, and enhancing existing solvers for model counting problems and their variants. The first iteration, brought together various researchers, identified challenges, and inspired numerous new applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the 2021-2023 iterations of the Model Counting Competition. We detail its execution and outcomes. The competition comprised four tracks, each focusing on a different variant of the model counting problem. The first track centered on the model counting problem (MC), which seeks the count of models for a given propositional formula. The second track challenged developers to submit programs capable of solving the weighted model counting problem (WMC). The third track was dedicated to projected model counting (PMC). Finally, we initiated a track that combined projected and weighted model counting (PWMC). The competition continued with a high level of participation, with seven to nine solvers submitted in various different version and based on quite diverging techniques.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. This challenge received a wide range of impressive solutions, which are developed and evaluated using our collected real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset. Unlike existing deraining datasets, our Raindrop Clarity dataset is more diverse and challenging in degradation types and contents, which includes day raindrop-focused, day background-focused, night raindrop-focused, and night background-focused degradations. This dataset is divided into three subsets for competition: 14,139 images for training, 240 images for validation, and 731 images for testing. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for the task of removing raindrops under varying lighting and focus conditions. There are a total of 361 participants in the competition, and 32 teams submitting valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset. The project can be found at https://lixinustc.github.io/CVPR-NTIRE2025-RainDrop-Competition.github.io/.

Multi-modal music generation, using multiple modalities like text, images, and video alongside musical scores and audio as guidance, is an emerging research area with broad applications. This paper reviews this field, categorizing music generation systems from the perspective of modalities. The review covers modality representation, multi-modal data alignment, and their utilization to guide music generation. Current datasets and evaluation methods are also discussed. Key challenges in this area include effective multi-modal integration, large-scale comprehensive datasets, and systematic evaluation methods. Finally, an outlook on future research directions is provided, focusing on creativity, efficiency, multi-modal alignment, and evaluation.

Bayesian Federated Learning (BFL) enables uncertainty quantification and robust adaptation in distributed learning. In contrast to the frequentist approach, it estimates the posterior distribution of a global model, offering insights into model reliability. However, current BFL methods neglect continual learning challenges in dynamic environments where data distributions shift over time. We propose a continual BFL framework applied to human sensing with radar data collected over several days. Using Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD), our approach sequentially updates the model, leveraging past posteriors to construct the prior for the new tasks. We assess the accuracy, the expected calibration error (ECE) and the convergence speed of our approach against several baselines. Results highlight the effectiveness of continual Bayesian updates in preserving knowledge and adapting to evolving data.

This work aligns deep learning (DL) with human reasoning capabilities and needs to enable more efficient, interpretable, and robust image classification. We approach this from three perspectives: explainability, causality, and biological vision. Introduction and background open this work before diving into operative chapters. First, we assess neural networks' visualization techniques for medical images and validate an explainable-by-design method for breast mass classification. A comprehensive review at the intersection of XAI and causality follows, where we introduce a general scaffold to organize past and future research, laying the groundwork for our second perspective. In the causality direction, we propose novel modules that exploit feature co-occurrence in medical images, leading to more effective and explainable predictions. We further introduce CROCODILE, a general framework that integrates causal concepts, contrastive learning, feature disentanglement, and prior knowledge to enhance generalization. Lastly, we explore biological vision, examining how humans recognize objects, and propose CoCoReco, a connectivity-inspired network with context-aware attention mechanisms. Overall, our key findings include: (i) simple activation maximization lacks insight for medical imaging DL models; (ii) prototypical-part learning is effective and radiologically aligned; (iii) XAI and causal ML are deeply connected; (iv) weak causal signals can be leveraged without a priori information to improve performance and interpretability; (v) our framework generalizes across medical domains and out-of-distribution data; (vi) incorporating biological circuit motifs improves human-aligned recognition. This work contributes toward human-aligned DL and highlights pathways to bridge the gap between research and clinical adoption, with implications for improved trust, diagnostic accuracy, and safe deployment.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring knowledge from complex teacher models to simpler student models, significantly enhancing model efficiency and accuracy. It has demonstrated substantial advancements in various applications including image classification, object detection, language modeling, text classification, and sentiment analysis. Recent innovations in KD methods, such as attention-based approaches, block-wise logit distillation, and decoupling distillation, have notably improved student model performance. These techniques focus on stimulus complexity, attention mechanisms, and global information capture to optimize knowledge transfer. In addition, KD has proven effective in compressing large language models while preserving accuracy, reducing computational overhead, and improving inference speed. This survey synthesizes the latest literature, highlighting key findings, contributions, and future directions in knowledge distillation to provide insights for researchers and practitioners on its evolving role in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

This paper presents a hybrid framework for literature reviews that augments traditional bibliometric methods with large language models (LLMs). By fine-tuning open-source LLMs, our approach enables scalable extraction of qualitative insights from large volumes of research content, enhancing both the breadth and depth of knowledge synthesis. To improve annotation efficiency and consistency, we introduce an error-focused validation process in which LLMs generate initial labels and human reviewers correct misclassifications. Applying this framework to over 20000 scientific articles about human migration, we demonstrate that a domain-adapted LLM can serve as a "specialist" model - capable of accurately selecting relevant studies, detecting emerging trends, and identifying critical research gaps. Notably, the LLM-assisted review reveals a growing scholarly interest in climate-induced migration. However, existing literature disproportionately centers on a narrow set of environmental hazards (e.g., floods, droughts, sea-level rise, and land degradation), while overlooking others that more directly affect human health and well-being, such as air and water pollution or infectious diseases. This imbalance highlights the need for more comprehensive research that goes beyond physical environmental changes to examine their ecological and societal consequences, particularly in shaping migration as an adaptive response. Overall, our proposed framework demonstrates the potential of fine-tuned LLMs to conduct more efficient, consistent, and insightful literature reviews across disciplines, ultimately accelerating knowledge synthesis and scientific discovery.

This systematic review discusses the methodological approaches and statistical confirmations of cross-cultural adaptations of cognitive evaluation tools used with different populations. The review considers six seminal studies on the methodology of cultural adaptation in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. The results indicate that proper adaptations need holistic models with demographic changes, and education explained as much as 26.76% of the variance in MoCA-H scores. Cultural-linguistic factors explained 6.89% of the variance in European adaptations of MoCA-H; however, another study on adapted MMSE and BCSB among Brazilian Indigenous populations reported excellent diagnostic performance, with a sensitivity of 94.4% and specificity of 99.2%. There was 78.5% inter-rater agreement on the evaluation of cultural adaptation using the Manchester Translation Evaluation Checklist. A paramount message of the paper is that community feedback is necessary for culturally appropriate preparation, standardized translation protocols also must be included, along with robust statistical validation methodologies for developing cognitive assessment instruments. This review supplies evidence-based frameworks for the further adaptation of cognitive assessments in increasingly diverse global health settings.

This review is focused on the data-driven approaches applied in different applications of Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion (AAI) of speech. This review paper considered the relevant works published in the last ten years (2011-2021). The selection criteria includes (a) type of AAI - Speaker Dependent and Speaker Independent AAI, (b) objectives of the work - Articulatory approximation, Articulatory Feature space selection and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), explore the correlation between acoustic and articulatory features, and framework for Computer-assisted language training, (c) Corpus - Simultaneously recorded speech (wav) and medical imaging models such as ElectroMagnetic Articulography (EMA), Electropalatography (EPG), Laryngography, Electroglottography (EGG), X-ray Cineradiography, Ultrasound, and real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rtMRI), (d) Methods or models - recent works are considered, and therefore all the works are based on machine learning, (e) Evaluation - as AAI is a non-linear regression problem, the performance evaluation is mostly done by Correlation Coefficient (CC), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and also considered Mean Square Error (MSE), and Mean Format Error (MFE). The practical application of the AAI model can provide a better and user-friendly interpretable image feedback system of articulatory positions, especially tongue movement. Such trajectory feedback system can be used to provide phonetic, language, and speech therapy for pathological subjects.