The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) is a powerful foundation model for promptable segmentation. However, its high computational and memory costs are a major barrier to deployment on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we present Q-SAM2, an accurate low-bit quantization method that achieves high compression and high fidelity. To address performance degradation arising from challenging weight and activation distributions during quantization, Q-SAM2 introduces two novel contributions: Variance-Reduced Calibration (VRC), an initialization method that reduces weight statistical variance by minimizing the Frobenius norm over a small calibration batch; and Learnable Statistical Clipping (LSC), a Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) method that learns momentum-stabilized clipping factors to manage outliers in weights and activations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Q-SAM2 achieves highly accurate inference with substantial efficiency gains, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art general QAT schemes, particularly in the ultra-low 2-bit regime. Specifically, Q-SAM2 achieves an accuracy gain of up to 9.7 ppt in J&F on the video segmentation benchmark and 7.3 ppt in mIoU for instance segmentation over the best competing QAT model, all while achieving an 8x reduction in model size compared to the BF16 baseline.

Research and practice in Intelligent Design (ID) have significantly enhanced engineering innovation, efficiency, quality, and productivity over recent decades, fundamentally reshaping how engineering designers think, behave, and interact with design processes. The recent emergence of Foundation Models (FMs), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has demonstrated general knowledge-based reasoning capabilities, and open new avenues for further transformation in engineering design. In this context, this paper introduces Intelligent Design 4.0 (ID 4.0) as an emerging paradigm empowered by foundation model-based agentic AI systems. We review the historical evolution of ID across four distinct stages: rule-based expert systems, task-specific machine learning models, large-scale foundation AI models, and the recent emerging paradigm of foundation model-based multi-agent collaboration. We propose an ontological framework for ID 4.0 and discuss its potential to support end-to-end automation of engineering design processes through coordinated, autonomous multi-agent-based systems. Furthermore, we discuss challenges and opportunities of ID 4.0, including perspectives on data foundations, agent collaboration mechanisms, and the formulation of design problems and objectives. In sum, these insights provide a foundation for advancing Intelligent Design toward greater adaptivity, autonomy, and effectiveness in addressing the growing complexity of engineering design.

This paper presents a tutorial-style survey and implementation guide of BemaGANv2, an advanced GANbased vocoder designed for high-fidelity and long-term audio generation. Long-term audio generation is critical for applications in Text-to-Music (TTM) and Text-to-Audio (TTA) systems, where maintaining temporal coherence, prosodic consistency, and harmonic structure over extended durations remains a significant challenge. Built upon the original BemaGAN architecture, BemaGANv2 incorporates major architectural innovations by replacing traditional ResBlocks in the generator with the Anti-aliased Multi-Periodicity composition (AMP) module, which internally applies the Snake activation function to better model periodic structures. In the discriminator framework, we integrate the Multi-Envelope Discriminator (MED), a novel architecture we proposed, to extract rich temporal envelope features crucial for periodicity detection. Coupled with the Multi-Resolution Discriminator (MRD), this combination enables more accurate modeling of long-range dependencies in audio. We systematically evaluate various discriminator configurations, including Multi-Scale Discriminator (MSD) + MED, MSD + MRD, and Multi-Period Discriminator (MPD) + MED + MRD, using objective metrics (Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC), Mel-Cepstral Distortion (MCD)) and subjective evaluations (MOS, SMOS). This paper also provides a comprehensive tutorial on the model architecture, training methodology, and implementation to promote reproducibility. The code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/dinhoitt/BemaGANv2.

Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs), especially smaller ones, often lack robustness in grade school math (GSM) reasoning. In particular, they tend to experience performance drops when faced with distribution shifts, such as changes to numerical or nominal variables, or insertions of distracting clauses. A possible strategy to address this involves generating synthetic data to further "instantiate" reasoning problems on potential variations. In this work, we instead focuses on the strategy of "abstracting" reasoning problems. This not only helps counteract distribution shifts but also facilitates the connection to symbolic tools for deriving solutions. Focusing on GSM, we find that this abstraction process is better acquired through reinforcement learning (RL) than just supervised fine-tuning, which often fails to produce faithful abstractions. Our method, AbstRaL -- which promotes abstract reasoning in LLMs using RL on granular abstraction data -- significantly mitigates performance degradation on recent GSM perturbation benchmarks. Besides, improving GSM robustness via AbstRaL is shown to also implicitly benefit LLMs' capabilities on OOD mathematical and general reasoning tasks, indicating that abstract thinking broadly enables better generalizability.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in table Question Answering (Table QA). However, extending these capabilities to multi-table QA remains challenging due to unreliable schema linking across complex tables. Existing methods based on semantic similarity work well only on simplified hand-crafted datasets and struggle to handle complex, real-world scenarios with numerous and diverse columns. To address this, we propose a graph-based framework that leverages human-curated relational knowledge to explicitly encode schema links and join paths. Given a natural language query, our method searches on graph to construct interpretable reasoning chains, aided by pruning and sub-path merging strategies to enhance efficiency and coherence. Experiments on both standard benchmarks and a realistic, large-scale dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. To our knowledge, this is the first multi-table QA system applied to truly complex industrial tabular data.

Evaluating explainability techniques, such as SHAP and LRP, in the context of audio deepfake detection is challenging due to lack of clear ground truth annotations. In the cases when we are able to obtain the ground truth, we find that these methods struggle to provide accurate explanations. In this work, we propose a novel data-driven approach to identify artifact regions in deepfake audio. We consider paired real and vocoded audio, and use the difference in time-frequency representation as the ground-truth explanation. The difference signal then serves as a supervision to train a diffusion model to expose the deepfake artifacts in a given vocoded audio. Experimental results on the VocV4 and LibriSeVoc datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional explainability techniques, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Optimization-based power control algorithms are predominantly iterative with high computational complexity, making them impractical for real-time applications in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CFmMIMO) systems. Learning-based methods have emerged as a promising alternative, and among them, graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated their excellent performance in solving power control problems. However, all existing GNN-based approaches assume ideal orthogonality among pilot sequences for user equipments (UEs), which is unrealistic given that the number of UEs exceeds the available orthogonal pilot sequences in CFmMIMO schemes. Moreover, most learning-based methods assume a fixed number of UEs, whereas the number of active UEs varies over time in practice. Additionally, supervised training necessitates costly computational resources for computing the target power control solutions for a large volume of training samples. To address these issues, we propose a graph attention network for downlink power control in CFmMIMO systems that operates in a self-supervised manner while effectively handling pilot contamination and adapting to a dynamic number of UEs. Experimental results show its effectiveness, even in comparison to the optimal accelerated projected gradient method as a baseline.

Large language models (LLMs) have witnessed rapid advancements, demonstrating remarkable capabilities. However, a notable vulnerability persists: LLMs often uncritically accept flawed or contradictory premises, leading to inefficient reasoning and unreliable outputs. This emphasizes the significance of possessing the \textbf{Premise Critique Ability} for LLMs, defined as the capacity to proactively identify and articulate errors in input premises. Most existing studies assess LLMs' reasoning ability in ideal settings, largely ignoring their vulnerabilities when faced with flawed premises. Thus, we introduce the \textbf{Premise Critique Bench (PCBench)}, designed by incorporating four error types across three difficulty levels, paired with multi-faceted evaluation metrics. We conducted systematic evaluations of 15 representative LLMs. Our findings reveal: (1) Most models rely heavily on explicit prompts to detect errors, with limited autonomous critique; (2) Premise critique ability depends on question difficulty and error type, with direct contradictions being easier to detect than complex or procedural errors; (3) Reasoning ability does not consistently correlate with the premise critique ability; (4) Flawed premises trigger overthinking in reasoning models, markedly lengthening responses due to repeated attempts at resolving conflicts. These insights underscore the urgent need to enhance LLMs' proactive evaluation of input validity, positioning premise critique as a foundational capability for developing reliable, human-centric systems. The code is available at https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/Premise_Critique.

Autonomous agentic AI systems powered by vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward real-world deployment, yet their cross-modal reasoning capabilities introduce new attack surfaces for adversarial manipulation that exploit semantic reasoning across modalities. Existing adversarial attacks typically rely on visible pixel perturbations or require privileged model or environment access, making them impractical for stealthy, real-world exploitation. We introduce TRAP, a novel generative adversarial framework that manipulates the agent's decision-making using diffusion-based semantic injections into the vision-language embedding space. Our method combines negative prompt-based degradation with positive semantic optimization, guided by a Siamese semantic network and layout-aware spatial masking. Without requiring access to model internals, TRAP produces visually natural images yet induces consistent selection biases in agentic AI systems. We evaluate TRAP on the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset, building multi-candidate decision scenarios. Across these scenarios, TRAP consistently induces decision-level preference redirection on leading models, including LLaVA-34B, Gemma3, GPT-4o, and Mistral-3.2, significantly outperforming existing baselines such as SPSA, Bandit, and standard diffusion approaches. These findings expose a critical, generalized vulnerability: autonomous agents can be consistently misled through visually subtle, semantically-guided cross-modal manipulations. Overall, our results show the need for defense strategies beyond pixel-level robustness to address semantic vulnerabilities in cross-modal decision-making. The code for TRAP is accessible on GitHub at https://github.com/uiuc-focal-lab/TRAP.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced their capabilities; however, their spatial perception abilities remain a notable limitation. To address this challenge, multimodal data synthesis offers a promising solution. Yet, ensuring that synthesized data adhere to spatial common sense is a non-trivial task. Our approach addresses this critical gap by providing a systematic framework for generating spatially coherent data. In this work, we introduce SKG2DATA, a novel multimodal synthesis approach guided by spatial knowledge graphs, grounded in the concept of knowledge-to-data generation. SKG2DATA employs an automated pipeline for constructing Spatial Knowledge Graph (SKG) that effectively captures human-like spatial cognition, including directional and distance relationships. These structured representations then serve as precise guidance for our integrated synthesis pipeline, where a diffusion model generates spatially-consistent images while a MLLM produces corresponding textual descriptions. The automated construction of SKG enables scalable generation of diverse yet realistic spatial configurations, overcoming the limitations of manual data collection and annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that data synthesized from diverse types of spatial knowledge, including direction and distance, enhance the spatial perception and reasoning abilities of MLLMs markedly, albeit with a slight cost to their general capabilities. We hope that the idea of knowledge-based data synthesis can advance the development of spatial intelligence. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/Knowledge2Data.