Deep Learning
Krul: Efficient State Restoration for Multi-turn Conversations with Dynamic Cross-layer KV Sharing
Wen, Junyi, Liang, Junyuan, Hong, Zicong, Chen, Wuhui, Cai, Ting, Zheng, Zibin
Efficient state restoration in multi-turn conversations with large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, primarily due to the overhead of recomputing or loading full key-value (KV) caches for all historical tokens. To address this, existing approaches compress KV caches across adjacent layers with highly similar attention patterns. However, these methods often apply a fixed compression scheme across all conversations, selecting the same layer pairs for compression without considering conversation-specific attention dynamics. This static strategy overlooks variability in attention pattern similarity across different conversations, which can lead to noticeable accuracy degradation. We present Krul, a multi-turn LLM inference system that enables accurate and efficient KV cache restoration. Krul dynamically selects compression strategies based on attention similarity across layer pairs and uses a recomputation-loading pipeline to restore the KV cache. It introduces three key innovations: 1) a preemptive compression strategy selector to preserve critical context for future conversation turns and selects a customized strategy for the conversation; 2) a token-wise heterogeneous attention similarity estimator to mitigate the attention similarity computation and storage overhead during model generation; 3) a bubble-free restoration scheduler to reduce potential bubbles brought by the imbalance of recomputing and loading stream due to compressed KV caches. Empirical evaluations on real-world tasks demonstrate that Krul achieves a 1.5x-2.68x reduction in time-to-first-token (TTFT) and a 1.33x-2.35x reduction in KV cache storage compared to state-of-the-art methods without compromising generation quality.
Architecting Clinical Collaboration: Multi-Agent Reasoning Systems for Multimodal Medical VQA
Thakrar, Karishma, Basavatia, Shreyas, Daftardar, Akshay
--Dermatological care via telemedicine often lacks the rich context of in-person visits. Clinicians must make diagnoses based on a handful of images and brief descriptions, without the benefit of physical exams, second opinions, or reference materials. While many medical AI systems attempt to bridge these gaps with domain-specific fine-tuning, this work hypothesized that mimicking clinical reasoning processes could offer a more effective path forward. This study tested seven vision-language models on medical visual question answering across six configurations: baseline models, fine-tuned variants, and both augmented with either reasoning layers that combine multiple model perspectives, analogous to peer consultation, or retrieval-augmented generation that incorporates medical literature at inference time, serving a role similar to reference-checking. While fine-tuning degraded performance in four of seven models with an average 30% decrease, baseline models collapsed on test data. Clinical-inspired architectures, meanwhile, achieved up to 70% accuracy, maintaining performance on unseen data while generating explainable, literature-grounded outputs critical for clinical adoption. These findings demonstrate that medical AI succeeds by reconstructing the collaborative and evidence-based practices fundamental to clinical diagnosis. Fine-tuning large models on medical data, the standard approach to medical AI, assumes domain exposure produces clinical competence [1]. Y et dermatology models show 15% performance drops in real-world settings [2], and catastrophic forgetting causes models to generate outputs exclusively from their training data [3]. This brittleness suggests a fundamental mismatch between current approaches and clinical reasoning. Additionally, physician groups achieve 85.6% diagnostic accuracy versus 62.5% for individuals [4], as collaboration reduces cognitive load and bias [5]. However, logistical constraints force physicians to work alone, a problem telemedicine intensifies by eliminating physical exams, peer consultation, and immediate reference access [6].
DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledge
Zhang, Wenyao, Liu, Hongsi, Qi, Zekun, Wang, Yunnan, Yu, Xinqiang, Zhang, Jiazhao, Dong, Runpei, He, Jiawei, Lu, Fan, Wang, He, Zhang, Zhizheng, Yi, Li, Zeng, Wenjun, Jin, Xin
Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in integrating image generation with action prediction to improve generalization and reasoning in robot manipulation. However, existing methods are limited to challenging image-based forecasting, which suffers from redundant information and lacks comprehensive and critical world knowledge, including dynamic, spatial and semantic information. To address these limitations, we propose DreamVLA, a novel VLA framework that integrates comprehensive world knowledge forecasting to enable inverse dynamics modeling, thereby establishing a perception-prediction-action loop for manipulation tasks. Specifically, DreamVLA introduces a dynamic-region-guided world knowledge prediction, integrated with the spatial and semantic cues, which provide compact yet comprehensive representations for action planning. This design aligns with how humans interact with the world by first forming abstract multimodal reasoning chains before acting. To mitigate interference among the dynamic, spatial and semantic information during training, we adopt a block-wise structured attention mechanism that masks their mutual attention, preventing information leakage and keeping each representation clean and disentangled. Moreover, to model the conditional distribution over future actions, we employ a diffusion-based transformer that disentangles action representations from shared latent features. Extensive experiments on both real-world and simulation environments demonstrate that DreamVLA achieves 76.7% success rate on real robot tasks and 4.44 average length on the CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks.
An Agentic System for Rare Disease Diagnosis with Traceable Reasoning
Zhao, Weike, Wu, Chaoyi, Fan, Yanjie, Zhang, Xiaoman, Qiu, Pengcheng, Sun, Yuze, Zhou, Xiao, Wang, Yanfeng, Sun, Xin, Zhang, Ya, Yu, Yongguo, Sun, Kun, Xie, Weidi
Rare diseases collectively affect over 300 million individuals worldwide, yet timely and accurate diagnosis remains a pervasive challenge. This is largely due to their clinical heterogeneity, low individual prevalence, and the limited familiarity most clinicians have with rare conditions. Here, we introduce DeepRare, the first rare disease diagnosis agentic system powered by a large language model (LLM), capable of processing heterogeneous clinical inputs. The system generates ranked diagnostic hypotheses for rare diseases, each accompanied by a transparent chain of reasoning that links intermediate analytic steps to verifiable medical evidence. DeepRare comprises three key components: a central host with a long-term memory module; specialized agent servers responsible for domain-specific analytical tasks integrating over 40 specialized tools and web-scale, up-to-date medical knowledge sources, ensuring access to the most current clinical information. This modular and scalable design enables complex diagnostic reasoning while maintaining traceability and adaptability. We evaluate DeepRare on eight datasets. The system demonstrates exceptional diagnostic performance among 2,919 diseases, achieving 100% accuracy for 1013 diseases. In HPO-based evaluations, DeepRare significantly outperforms other 15 methods, like traditional bioinformatics diagnostic tools, LLMs, and other agentic systems, achieving an average Recall@1 score of 57.18% and surpassing the second-best method (Reasoning LLM) by a substantial margin of 23.79 percentage points. For multi-modal input scenarios, DeepRare achieves 70.60% at Recall@1 compared to Exomiser's 53.20% in 109 cases. Manual verification of reasoning chains by clinical experts achieves 95.40% agreements. Furthermore, the DeepRare system has been implemented as a user-friendly web application http://raredx.cn/doctor.
Spectra-to-Structure and Structure-to-Spectra Inference Across the Periodic Table
Wang, Yufeng, Wang, Peiyao, Wei, Lu, Ma, Lu, Lin, Yuewei, Liu, Qun, Ling, Haibin
X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) is a powerful technique for probing local atomic environments, yet its interpretation remains limited by the need for expert-driven analysis, computationally expensive simulations, and element-specific heuristics. Recent advances in machine learning have shown promise for accelerating XAS interpretation, but many existing models are narrowly focused on specific elements, edge types, or spectral regimes. In this work, we present XAStruct, a learning-based system capable of both predicting XAS spectra from crystal structures and inferring local structural descriptors from XAS input. XAStruct is trained on a large-scale dataset spanning over 70 elements across the periodic table, enabling generalization to a wide variety of chemistries and bonding environments. The framework includes the first machine learning approach for predicting neighbor atom types directly from XAS spectra, as well as a generalizable regression model for mean nearest-neighbor distance that requires no element-specific tuning. By combining deep neural networks for complex structure property mappings with efficient baseline models for simpler tasks, XAStruct offers a scalable and extensible solution for data-driven XAS analysis and local structure inference. The source code will be released upon paper acceptance.
Measuring Sycophancy of Language Models in Multi-turn Dialogues
Hong, Jiseung, Byun, Grace, Kim, Seungone, Shu, Kai, Choi, Jinho D.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to provide helpful and harmless responses, yet they often exhibit sycophancy--conforming to user beliefs regardless of factual accuracy or ethical soundness. Prior research on sycophancy has primarily focused on single-turn factual correctness, overlooking the dynamics of real-world interactions. In this work, we introduce SYCON Bench, a novel benchmark for evaluating sycophantic behavior in multi-turn, free-form conversational settings. Our benchmark measures how quickly a model conforms to the user (Turn of Flip) and how frequently it shifts its stance under sustained user pressure (Number of Flip). Applying SYCON Bench to 17 LLMs across three real-world scenarios, we find that sycophancy remains a prevalent failure mode. Our analysis shows that alignment tuning amplifies sycophantic behavior, whereas model scaling and reasoning optimization strengthen the model's ability to resist undesirable user views. Reasoning models generally outperform instruction-tuned models but often fail when they over-index on logical exposition instead of directly addressing the user's underlying beliefs. Finally, we evaluate four additional prompting strategies and demonstrate that adopting a third-person perspective reduces sycophancy by up to 63.8% in debate scenario. We release our code and data at https://github.com/JiseungHong/SYCON-Bench.
Large Language Models for Depression Recognition in Spoken Language Integrating Psychological Knowledge
Li, Yupei, Shao, Shuaijie, Milling, Manuel, Schuller, Björn W.
Depression is a growing concern gaining attention in both public discourse and AI research. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have been used for recognition, they still lack real-world effectiveness. Large language models (LLMs) show strong potential but require domain-specific fine-tuning and struggle with non-textual cues. Since depression is often expressed through vocal tone and behaviour rather than explicit text, relying on language alone is insufficient. Diagnostic accuracy also suffers without incorporating psychological expertise. To address these limitations, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first application of LLMs to multimodal depression detection using the DAIC-WOZ dataset. We extract the audio features using the pre-trained model Wav2Vec, and mapped it to text-based LLMs for further processing. We also propose a novel strategy for incorporating psychological knowledge into LLMs to enhance diagnostic performance, specifically using a question and answer set to grant authorised knowledge to LLMs. Our approach yields a notable improvement in both Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) compared to a base score proposed by the related original paper. The codes are available at https://github.com/myxp-lyp/Depression-detection.git
Jigsaw-Puzzles: From Seeing to Understanding to Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Lyu, Zesen, Zhang, Dandan, Ye, Wei, Li, Fangdi, Jiang, Zhihang, Yang, Yao
Spatial reasoning is a core component of human cognition, enabling individuals to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. It relies on a nuanced understanding of spatial structures and inter-object relationships, serving as the foundation for complex reasoning and decision-making. To investigate whether current vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit similar capability, we introduce Jigsaw-Puzzles, a novel benchmark consisting of 1,100 carefully curated real-world images with high spatial complexity. Based on this dataset, we design five tasks to rigorously evaluate VLMs' spatial perception, structural understanding, and reasoning capabilities, while deliberately minimizing reliance on domain-specific knowledge to better isolate and assess the general spatial reasoning capability. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across 24 state-of-the-art VLMs. The results show that even the strongest model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves only 77.14% overall accuracy and performs particularly poorly on the Order Generation task, with only 30.00% accuracy, far below the performance exceeding 90% achieved by human participants. This persistent gap underscores the need for continued progress, positioning Jigsaw-Puzzles as a challenging and diagnostic benchmark for advancing spatial reasoning research in VLMs. Our project page is at https://zesen01.github.io/jigsaw-puzzles.
Debate-to-Detect: Reformulating Misinformation Detection as a Real-World Debate with Large Language Models
Han, Chen, Zheng, Wenzhen, Tang, Xijin
The proliferation of misinformation in digital platforms reveals the limitations of traditional detection methods, which mostly rely on static classification and fail to capture the intricate process of real-world fact-checking. Despite advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) that enhance automated reasoning, their application to misinformation detection remains hindered by issues of logical inconsistency and superficial verification. In response, we introduce Debate-to-Detect (D2D), a novel Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) framework that reformulates misinformation detection as a structured adversarial debate. Inspired by fact-checking workflows, D2D assigns domain-specific profiles to each agent and orchestrates a five-stage debate process, including Opening Statement, Rebuttal, Free Debate, Closing Statement, and Judgment. To transcend traditional binary classification, D2D introduces a multi-dimensional evaluation mechanism that assesses each claim across five distinct dimensions: Factuality, Source Reliability, Reasoning Quality, Clarity, and Ethics. Experiments with GPT-4o on two datasets demonstrate significant improvements over baseline methods, and the case study highlight D2D's capability to iteratively refine evidence while improving decision transparency, representing a substantial advancement towards interpretable misinformation detection. The code will be released publicly after the official publication.
EVM-Fusion: An Explainable Vision Mamba Architecture with Neural Algorithmic Fusion
Medical image classification is critical for clinical decision-making, yet demands for accuracy, interpretability, and generalizability remain challenging. This paper introduces EVM-Fusion, an Explainable Vision Mamba architecture featuring a novel Neural Algorithmic Fusion (NAF) mechanism for multi-organ medical image classification. EVM-Fusion leverages a multipath design, where DenseNet and U-Net based pathways, enhanced by Vision Mamba (Vim) modules, operate in parallel with a traditional feature pathway. These diverse features are dynamically integrated via a two-stage fusion process: cross-modal attention followed by the iterative NAF block, which learns an adaptive fusion algorithm. Intrinsic explainability is embedded through path-specific spatial attention, Vim Δ-value maps, traditional feature SE-attention, and cross-modal attention weights. Experiments on a diverse 9-class multi-organ medical image dataset demonstrate EVM-Fusion's strong classification performance, achieving 99.75% test accuracy and provide multi-faceted insights into its decision-making process, highlighting its potential for trustworthy AI in medical diagnostics.