Large language models have shown promise in clinical decision making, but current approaches struggle to localize and correct errors at specific steps of the reasoning process. This limitation is critical in medicine, where identifying and addressing reasoning errors is essential for accurate diagnosis and effective patient care. We introduce Med-PRM, a process reward modeling framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation to verify each reasoning step against established medical knowledge bases. By verifying intermediate reasoning steps with evidence retrieved from clinical guidelines and literature, our model can precisely assess the reasoning quality in a fine-grained manner. Evaluations on five medical QA benchmarks and two open-ended diagnostic tasks demonstrate that Med-PRM achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improving the performance of base models by up to 13.50% using Med-PRM. Moreover, we demonstrate the generality of Med-PRM by integrating it in a plug-and-play fashion with strong policy models such as Meerkat, achieving over 80\% accuracy on MedQA for the first time using small-scale models of 8 billion parameters. Our code and data are available at: https://med-prm.github.io/

Though safety alignment has been applied to most large language models (LLMs), LLM service providers generally deploy a subsequent moderation as the external safety guardrail in real-world products. Existing moderators mainly practice a conventional full detection, which determines the harmfulness based on the complete LLM output, causing high service latency. Recent works pay more attention to partial detection where moderators oversee the generation midway and early stop the output if harmfulness is detected, but they directly apply moderators trained with the full detection paradigm to incomplete outputs, introducing a training-inference gap that lowers the performance. In this paper, we explore how to form a data-and-model solution that natively supports partial detection. For the data, we construct FineHarm, a dataset consisting of 29K prompt-response pairs with fine-grained annotations to provide reasonable supervision for token-level training. Then, we propose the streaming content monitor, which is trained with dual supervision of response- and token-level labels and can follow the output stream of LLM to make a timely judgment of harmfulness. Experiments show that SCM gains 0.95+ in macro F1 score that is comparable to full detection, by only seeing the first 18% of tokens in responses on average. Moreover, the SCM can serve as a pseudo-harmfulness annotator for improving safety alignment and lead to a higher harmlessness score than DPO.

Handwritten text recognition aims to convert visual input into machine-readable text, and it remains challenging due to the evolving and context-dependent nature of handwriting. Character sets change over time, and character frequency distributions shift across historical periods or regions, often causing models trained on broad, heterogeneous corpora to underperform on specific subsets. To tackle this, we propose a novel loss function that incorporates the Wasserstein distance between the character frequency distribution of the predicted text and a target distribution empirically derived from training data. By penalizing divergence from expected distributions, our approach enhances both accuracy and robustness under temporal and contextual intra-dataset shifts. Furthermore, we demonstrate that character distribution alignment can also improve existing models at inference time without requiring retraining by integrating it as a scoring function in a guided decoding scheme. Experimental results across multiple datasets and architectures confirm the effectiveness of our method in boosting generalization and performance. We open source our code at https://github.com/pkaliosis/fada.

Transformer models achieve excellent scaling property, where the performance is improved with the increment of model capacity. However, large-scale model parameters lead to an unaffordable cost of computing and memory. We analyze popular transformer architectures and find that multilayer perceptron (MLP) modules take up the majority of model parameters. To this end, we focus on the recoverability of the compressed models and propose a Diversity-Guided MLP Reduction (DGMR) method to significantly reduce the parameters of large vision transformers with only negligible performance degradation. Specifically, we conduct a Gram-Schmidt weight pruning strategy to eliminate redundant neurons of MLP hidden layer, while preserving weight diversity for better performance recover during distillation. Compared to the model trained from scratch, our pruned model only requires 0.06\% data of LAION-2B (for the training of large vision transformers) without labels (ImageNet-1K) to recover the original performance. Experimental results on several state-of-the-art large vision transformers demonstrate that our method achieves a more than 57.0\% parameter and FLOPs reduction in a near lossless manner. Notably, for EVA-CLIP-E (4.4B), our method accomplishes a 71.5\% parameter and FLOPs reduction without performance degradation. The source code and trained weights are available at https://github.com/visresearch/DGMR.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has achieved remarkable success with deep learning, driving advancements in conversational artificial intelligence, media transcription, and assistive technologies. However, ASR systems still struggle in complex environments such as TV series, where multiple speakers, overlapping speech, domain-specific terminology, and long-range contextual dependencies pose significant challenges to transcription accuracy. Existing approaches fail to explicitly leverage the rich temporal and contextual information available in the video. To address this limitation, we propose a Video-Guided Post-ASR Correction (VPC) framework that uses a Video-Large Multimodal Model (VLMM) to capture video context and refine ASR outputs. Evaluations on a TV-series benchmark show that our method consistently improves transcription accuracy in complex multimedia environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in text summarization and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, these systems often inherit associative and framing biases from pre-training data, leading to inappropriate or unfair outputs in downstream tasks. In this work, we present AdvSumm (Adversarial Summarization), a domain-agnostic training framework designed to mitigate bias in text summarization through improved generalization. Inspired by adversarial robustness, AdvSumm introduces a novel Perturber component that applies gradient-guided perturbations at the embedding level of Sequence-to-Sequence models, enhancing the model's robustness to input variations. We empirically demonstrate that AdvSumm effectively reduces different types of bias in summarization-specifically, name-nationality bias and political framing bias-without compromising summarization quality. Compared to standard transformers and data augmentation techniques like back-translation, AdvSumm achieves stronger bias mitigation performance across benchmark datasets.

Research on generative systems in music has seen considerable attention and growth in recent years. A variety of attempts have been made to systematically evaluate such systems. We present an interdisciplinary review of the common evaluation targets, methodologies, and metrics for the evaluation of both system output and model use, covering subjective and objective approaches, qualitative and quantitative approaches, as well as empirical and computational methods. We examine the benefits and limitations of these approaches from a musicological, an engineering, and an HCI perspective.

Were Residual Penalty and Neural Operators All We Needed for Solving Optimal Control Problems? Abstract-- Neural networks have been used to solve optimal control problems, typically by training neural networks using a combined loss function that considers data, differential equation residuals, and objective costs. We show that including cost functions in the training process is unnecessary, advocating for a simpler architecture and streamlined approach by decoupling the optimal control problem from the training process. Thus, our work shows that a simple neural operator architecture, such as DeepONet, coupled with an unconstrained optimization routine, can solve multiple optimal control problems with a single physics-informed training phase and a subsequent optimization phase. We achieve this by adding a penalty term based on the differential equation residual to the cost function and computing gradients with respect to the control using automatic differentiation through the trained neural operator within an iterative optimization routine. Our results show acceptable accuracy for practical applications and potential computational savings for more complex and higher-dimensional problems. I. INTRODUCTION An optimal control problem is an optimization problem in which the system dynamics are described by differential equations, either ordinary differential equations (ODEs) or partial differential equations (PDEs), that explicitly depend on a control input.

Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across multiple tasks. However, their trustworthiness is often challenged by hallucinations, which can be attributed to the modality misalignment and the inherent hallucinations of their underlying Large Language Models (LLMs) backbone. Existing preference alignment methods focus on aligning model responses with human preferences while neglecting image-text modality alignment, resulting in over-reliance on LLMs and hallucinations. In this paper, we propose Entity-centric Multimodal Preference Optimization (EMPO), which achieves enhanced modality alignment compared to existing human preference alignment methods. Besides, to overcome the scarcity of high-quality multimodal preference data, we utilize open-source instruction datasets to automatically construct high-quality preference data across three aspects: image, instruction, and response. Experiments on two human preference datasets and five multimodal hallucination benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of EMPO, e.g., reducing hallucination rates by 85.9\% on Object-HalBench and 49.8\% on MM-HalBench.

LLMs have shown impressive progress in natural language processing. However, they still face significant challenges in TableQA, where real-world complexities such as diverse table structures, multilingual data, and domain-specific reasoning are crucial. Existing TableQA benchmarks are often limited by their focus on simple flat tables and suffer from data leakage. Furthermore, most benchmarks are monolingual and fail to capture the cross-lingual and cross-domain variability in practical applications. To address these limitations, we introduce TableEval, a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on realistic TableQA tasks. Specifically, TableEval includes tables with various structures (such as concise, hierarchical, and nested tables) collected from four domains (including government, finance, academia, and industry reports). Besides, TableEval features cross-lingual scenarios with tables in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English. To minimize the risk of data leakage, we collect all data from recent real-world documents. Considering that existing TableQA metrics fail to capture semantic accuracy, we further propose SEAT, a new evaluation framework that assesses the alignment between model responses and reference answers at the sub-question level. Experimental results have shown that SEAT achieves high agreement with human judgment. Extensive experiments on TableEval reveal critical gaps in the ability of state-of-the-art LLMs to handle these complex, real-world TableQA tasks, offering insights for future improvements. We make our dataset available here: https://github.com/wenge-research/TableEval.