We expect this technique to be of broader interest.

Active vision, also known as active perception, refers to the process of actively selecting where and how to look in order to gather task-relevant information. It is a critical component of efficient perception and decision-making in humans and advanced embodied agents. Recently, the use of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as central planning and decision-making modules in robotic systems has gained extensive attention. However, despite the importance of active perception in embodied intelligence, there is little to no exploration of how MLLMs can be equipped with or learn active perception capabilities. In this paper, we first provide a systematic definition of MLLM-based active perception tasks. We point out that the recently proposed GPT-o3 model's zoom-in search strategy can be regarded as a special case of active perception; however, it still suffers from low search efficiency and inaccurate region selection. To address these issues, we propose ACTIVE-O3, a purely reinforcement learning based training framework built on top of GRPO, designed to equip MLLMs with active perception capabilities. We further establish a comprehensive benchmark suite to evaluate ACTIVE-O3 across both general open-world tasks, such as small-object and dense object grounding, and domain-specific scenarios, including small object detection in remote sensing and autonomous driving, as well as fine-grained interactive segmentation. In addition, ACTIVE-O3 also demonstrates strong zero-shot reasoning abilities on the V* Benchmark, without relying on any explicit reasoning data. We hope that our work can provide a simple codebase and evaluation protocol to facilitate future research on active perception in MLLMs.

In cross-silo Federated Learning (FL), client selection is critical to ensure high model performance, yet it remains challenging due to data quality decompensa-tion, budget constraints, and incentive compatibility. As training progresses, these factors exacerbate client heterogeneity and degrade global performance. Most existing approaches treat these challenges in isolation, making jointly optimizing multiple factors difficult. To address this, we propose Shapley-Bid Reputation Optimized Federated Learning (SBRO-FL), a unified framework integrating dynamic bidding, reputation modeling, and cost-aware selection. Clients submit bids based on their perceived data quality, and their contributions are evaluated using Shapley values to quantify their marginal impact on the global model. A reputation system, inspired by prospect theory, captures historical performance while penalizing inconsistency. The client selection problem is formulated as a 0-1 integer program that maximizes reputation-weighted utility under budget constraints. Experiments on FashionMNIST, EMNIST, CIFAR-10, and SVHN datasets show that SBRO-FL improves accuracy, convergence speed, and robustness, even in adversarial and low-bid interference scenarios. Our results highlight the importance of balancing data reliability, incentive compatibility, and cost efficiency to enable scalable and trustworthy FL deployments.

Although \textbf{L}abel \textbf{D}istribution \textbf{L}earning (LDL) has promising representation capabilities for characterizing the polysemy of an instance, the complexity and high cost of the label distribution annotation lead to inexact in the construction of the label space. The existence of a large number of inexact labels generates a label space with uncertainty, which misleads the LDL algorithm to yield incorrect decisions. To alleviate this problem, we model the uncertainty of label distributions by constructing a \textbf{L}atent \textbf{L}abel \textbf{D}istribution \textbf{G}rid (LLDG) to form a low-noise representation space. Specifically, we first construct a label correlation matrix based on the differences between labels, and then expand each value of the matrix into a vector that obeys a Gaussian distribution, thus building a LLDG to model the uncertainty of the label space. Finally, the LLDG is reconstructed by the LLDG-Mixer to generate an accurate label distribution. Note that we enforce a customized low-rank scheme on this grid, which assumes that the label relations may be noisy and it needs to perform noise-reduction with the help of a Tucker reconstruction technique. Furthermore, we attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the LLDG by considering its generation as an upstream task to achieve the classification of the objects. Extensive experimental results show that our approach performs competitively on several benchmarks.

Low-Altitude Economic Networking (LAENet) aims to support diverse flying applications below 1,000 meters by deploying various aerial vehicles for flexible and cost-effective aerial networking. However, complex decision-making, resource constraints, and environmental uncertainty pose significant challenges to the development of the LAENet. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a potential solution in response to these challenges but has limitations in generalization, reward design, and model stability. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) offers new opportunities for RL to mitigate these limitations. In this paper, we first present a tutorial about integrating LLMs into RL by using the capacities of generation, contextual understanding, and structured reasoning of LLMs. We then propose an LLM-enhanced RL framework for the LAENet in terms of serving the LLM as information processor, reward designer, decision-maker, and generator. Moreover, we conduct a case study by using LLMs to design a reward function to improve the learning performance of RL in the LAENet. Finally, we provide a conclusion and discuss future work.

Heuristic design with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach for tackling combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). However, existing approaches often rely on manually predefined evolutionary computation (EC) optimizers and single-task training schemes, which may constrain the exploration of diverse heuristic algorithms and hinder the generalization of the resulting heuristics. To address these issues, we propose Meta-Optimization of Heuristics (MoH), a novel framework that operates at the optimizer level, discovering effective optimizers through the principle of meta-learning. Specifically, MoH leverages LLMs to iteratively refine a meta-optimizer that autonomously constructs diverse optimizers through (self-)invocation, thereby eliminating the reliance on a predefined EC optimizer. These constructed optimizers subsequently evolve heuristics for downstream tasks, enabling broader heuristic exploration. Moreover, MoH employs a multi-task training scheme to promote its generalization capability. Experiments on classic COPs demonstrate that MoH constructs an effective and interpretable meta-optimizer, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various downstream tasks, particularly in cross-size settings.

In long-term time series forecasting, different variables often influence the target variable over distinct time intervals, a challenge known as the multi-delay issue. Traditional models typically process all variables or time points uniformly, which limits their ability to capture complex variable relationships and obtain non-trivial time representations. To address this issue, we propose TimePro, an innovative Mamba-based model that constructs variate- and time-aware hyper-states. Unlike conventional approaches that merely transfer plain states across variable or time dimensions, TimePro preserves the fine-grained temporal features of each variate token and adaptively selects the focused time points to tune the plain state. The reconstructed hyper-state can perceive both variable relationships and salient temporal information, which helps the model make accurate forecasting. In experiments, TimePro performs competitively on eight real-world long-term forecasting benchmarks with satisfactory linear complexity. Code is available at https://github.com/xwmaxwma/TimePro.

Federated learning (FL) faces significant challenges in Internet of Things (IoT) networks due to device limitations in energy and communication resources, especially when considering the large size of FL models. From an energy perspective, the challenge is aggravated if devices rely on energy harvesting (EH), as energy availability can vary significantly over time, influencing the average number of participating users in each iteration. Additionally, the transmission of large model updates is more susceptible to interference from uncorrelated background traffic in shared wireless environments. As an alternative, federated distillation (FD) reduces communication overhead and energy consumption by transmitting local model outputs, which are typically much smaller than the entire model used in FL. However, this comes at the cost of reduced model accuracy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose FL-distillation alternation (FLDA). In FLDA, devices alternate between FD and FL phases, balancing model information with lower communication overhead and energy consumption per iteration. We consider a multichannel slotted-ALOHA EH-IoT network subject to background traffic/interference. In such a scenario, FLDA demonstrates higher model accuracy than both FL and FD, and achieves faster convergence than FL. Moreover, FLDA achieves target accuracies saving up to 98% in energy consumption, while also being less sensitive to interference, both relative to FL.

Generative modeling of time series is a central challenge in time series analysis, particularly under data-scarce conditions. Despite recent advances in generative modeling, a comprehensive understanding of how state-of-the-art generative models perform under limited supervision remains lacking. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale study evaluating leading generative models in data-scarce settings, revealing a substantial performance gap between full-data and data-scarce regimes. To close this gap, we propose a unified diffusion-based generative framework that can synthesize high-fidelity time series across diverse domains using just a few examples. Our model is pre-trained on a large, heterogeneous collection of time series datasets, enabling it to learn generalizable temporal representations. It further incorporates architectural innovations such as dynamic convolutional layers for flexible channel adaptation and dataset token conditioning for domain-aware generation. Without requiring abundant supervision, our unified model achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot settings-outperforming domain-specific baselines across a wide range of subset sizes. Remarkably, it also surpasses all baselines even when tested on full datasets benchmarks, highlighting the strength of pre-training and cross-domain generalization. We hope this work encourages the community to revisit few-shot generative modeling as a key problem in time series research and pursue unified solutions that scale efficiently across domains. Code is available at https://github.com/azencot-group/ImagenFew.