Over the past decade, the demand for communication devices has increased among individuals with mobility and speech impairments. Eye-gaze tracking has emerged as a promising solution for hands-free communication; however, traditional appearance-based interfaces often face challenges such as accuracy issues, involuntary eye movements, and difficulties with extensive command sets. This work presents a multimodal appearance-based gaze-controlled virtual keyboard that utilises deep learning in conjunction with standard camera hardware, incorporating both synchronous and asynchronous modes for command selection. The virtual keyboard application supports menu-based selection with nine commands, enabling users to spell and type up to 56 English characters, including uppercase and lowercase letters, punctuation, and a delete function for corrections. The proposed system was evaluated with twenty able-bodied participants who completed specially designed typing tasks using three input modalities: (i) a mouse, (ii) an eye-tracker, and (iii) an unmodified webcam. Typing performance was measured in terms of speed and information transfer rate (ITR) at both command and letter levels. Average typing speeds were 18.3+-5.31 letters/min (mouse), 12.60+-2.99letters/min (eye-tracker, synchronous), 10.94 +- 1.89 letters/min (webcam, synchronous), 11.15 +- 2.90 letters/min (eye-tracker, asynchronous), and 7.86 +- 1.69 letters/min (webcam, asynchronous). ITRs were approximately 80.29 +- 15.72 bits/min (command level) and 63.56 +- 11 bits/min (letter level) with webcam in synchronous mode. The system demonstrated good usability and low workload with webcam input, highlighting its user-centred design and promise as an accessible communication tool in low-resource settings.

High-quality prompts are crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve exceptional performance. However, manually crafting effective prompts is labor-intensive and demands significant domain expertise, limiting its scalability. Existing automatic prompt optimization methods either extensively explore new prompt candidates, incurring high computational costs due to inefficient searches within a large solution space, or overly exploit feedback on existing prompts, risking suboptimal optimization because of the complex prompt landscape. To address these challenges, we introduce GreenTEA, an agentic LLM workflow for automatic prompt optimization that balances candidate exploration and knowledge exploitation. It leverages a collaborative team of agents to iteratively refine prompts based on feedback from error samples. An analyzing agent identifies common error patterns resulting from the current prompt via topic modeling, and a generation agent revises the prompt to directly address these key deficiencies. This refinement process is guided by a genetic algorithm framework, which simulates natural selection by evolving candidate prompts through operations such as crossover and mutation to progressively optimize model performance. Extensive numerical experiments conducted on public benchmark datasets suggest the superior performance of GreenTEA against human-engineered prompts and existing state-of-the-arts for automatic prompt optimization, covering logical and quantitative reasoning, commonsense, and ethical decision-making.

Delivering intelligent and adaptive navigation assistance in augmented reality (AR) requires more than visual cues, as it demands systems capable of interpreting flexible user intent and reasoning over both spatial and semantic context. Prior AR navigation systems often rely on rigid input schemes or predefined commands, which limit the utility of rich building data and hinder natural interaction. In this work, we propose an embodied AR navigation system that integrates Building Information Modeling (BIM) with a multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework to support flexible, language-driven goal retrieval and route planning. The system orchestrates three language agents, Triage, Search, and Response, built on large language models (LLMs), which enables robust interpretation of open-ended queries and spatial reasoning using BIM data. Navigation guidance is delivered through an embodied AR agent, equipped with voice interaction and locomotion, to enhance user experience. A real-world user study yields a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 80.5, indicating excellent usability, and comparative evaluations show that the embodied interface can significantly improves users' perception of system intelligence. These results underscore the importance and potential of language-grounded reasoning and embodiment in the design of user-centered AR navigation systems.

Functional connectivity (FC) derived from resting-state fMRI plays a critical role in personalized predictions such as age and cognitive performance. However, applying foundation models(FM) to fMRI data remains challenging due to its high dimensionality, computational complexity, and the difficulty in capturing complex spatiotemporal dynamics and indirect region-of-interest (ROI) interactions. To address these limitations, we propose a modular neuroimaging framework that integrates principles from FM with efficient, domain-specific architectures. Our approach begins with a Local Masked Au-toencoder (LMAE) for pretraining, which reduces the influence of hemodynamic response function (HRF) dynamics and suppresses noise. This is followed by a Random Walk Mixture of Experts (RWMOE) module that clusters features across spatial and temporal dimensions, effectively capturing intricate brain interactions. Finally, a state-space model (SSM)-based predictor performs downstream task inference. Evaluated on the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) dataset, our framework achieved mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 5.343 for age prediction and 2.940 for fluid intelligence, with Pearson correlation coefficients (PCCs) of 0.928 and 0.887, respectively--outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Visualization of expert distribution weights further enhances interpretability by identifying key brain regions. This work provides a robust, interpretable alternative to LLM-based approaches for fMRI analysis, offering novel insights into brain aging and cognitive function.

Comprehending the long-timescale dynamics of protein-ligand complexes is very important for drug discovery and structural biology, but it continues to be computationally challenging for large biomolecular systems. We introduce HemePLM-Diffuse, an innovative generative transformer model that is designed for accurate simulation of protein-ligand trajectories, inpaints the missing ligand fragments, and sample transition paths in systems with more than 10,000 atoms. HemePLM-Diffuse has features of SE(3)-Invariant to-kenization approach for proteins and ligands, that utilizes time-aware cross-attentional diffusion to effectively capture atomic motion. We also demonstrate its capabilities using the 3CQV HEME system, showing enhanced accuracy and scalability compared to leading models such as TorchMD-Net, MDGEN, and Uni-Mol.

Predicting user intentions in virtual reality (VR) is crucial for creating im-mersive experiences, particularly in tasks involving complex grasping motions where accurate haptic feedback is essential. In this work, we leverage time-series data from hand movements to evaluate both classification and regression approaches across 810 trials with varied object types, sizes, and manipulations. Our findings reveal that classification models struggle to generalize across users, leading to inconsistent performance. In contrast, regression-based approaches, particularly those using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, demonstrate more robust performance, with timing errors within 0.25 seconds and distance errors around 5-20 cm in the critical two-second window before a grasp. Despite these improvements, predicting precise hand postures remains challenging. Through a comprehensive analysis of user variability and model interpretability, we explore why certain models fail and how regression models better accommodate the dynamic and complex nature of user behavior in VR. Our results underscore the potential of machine learning models to enhance VR interactions, particularly through adaptive haptic feedback, and lay the groundwork for future advancements in real-time prediction of user actions in VR.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generative tasks such as image synthesis and video generation, with Transformer architectures further enhancing performance. However, the high computational cost of diffusion Transformers--stemming from a large number of sampling steps and complex per-step computations--presents significant challenges for real-time deployment. In this paper, we introduce OmniCache, a training-free acceleration method that exploits the global redundancy inherent in the denoising process. Unlike existing methods that determine caching strategies based on inter-step similarities and tend to prioritize reusing later sampling steps, our approach originates from the sampling perspective of DIT models. W e systematically analyze the model's sampling trajectories and strategically distribute cache reuse across the entire sampling process. This global perspective enables more effective utilization of cached computations throughout the diffusion trajectory, rather than concentrating reuse within limited segments of the sampling procedure. In addition, during cache reuse, we dynamically estimate the corresponding noise and filter it out to reduce its impact on the sampling direction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach accelerates the sampling process while maintaining competitive generative quality, offering a promising and practical solution for efficient deployment of diffusion-based generative models.

Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, compresses key-value states into a low-rank latent vector, caching only this vector to reduce memory. In tensor parallelism (TP), however, attention heads are computed across multiple devices, and each device must load the full cache, eroding the advantage of MLA over Grouped Query Attention (GQA). We propose Tensor-Parallel Latent Attention (TPLA): a scheme that partitions both the latent representation and each head's input dimension across devices, performs attention independently per shard, and then combines results with an all-reduce. TPLA preserves the benefits of a compressed KV cache while unlocking TP efficiency. Unlike Grouped Latent Attention (GLA), every head in TPLA still leverages the full latent representation, maintaining stronger representational capacity. TPLA is drop-in compatible with models pre-trained using MLA: it supports MLA-style prefilling and enables efficient tensor-parallel decoding without retraining. Applying simple orthogonal transforms -- e.g., the Hadamard transform or PCA -- before TP slicing further mitigates cross-shard interference, yielding minimal accuracy degradation. By reducing the per-device KV cache for DeepSeek-V3 and Kimi-K2, we achieve 1.79x and 1.93x speedups, respectively, at a 32K-token context length while maintaining performance on commonsense and LongBench benchmarks. TPLA can be implemented with FlashAttention-3, enabling practical end-to-end acceleration.

In recent years, a plethora of open-source foundation models have emerged, achieving remarkable progress in some widely attended fields, with performance being quite close to that of closed-source models. However, in high-value but more challenging scientific professional fields, either the fields still rely on expert models, or the progress of general foundation models lags significantly compared to those in popular areas, far from sufficient for transforming scientific research and leaving substantial gap between open-source models and closed-source models in these scientific domains. To mitigate this gap and explore a step further toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), we introduce Intern-S1, a specialized generalist equipped with general understanding and reasoning capabilities with expertise to analyze multiple science modal data. Intern-S1 is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 28 billion activated parameters and 241 billion total parameters, continually pre-trained on 5T tokens, including over 2.5T tokens from scientific domains. In the post-training stage, Intern-S1 undergoes offline and then online reinforcement learning (RL) in InternBootCamp, where we propose Mixture-of-Rewards (MoR) to synergize the RL training on more than 1000 tasks simultaneously. Through integrated innovations in algorithms, data, and training systems, Intern-S1 achieved top-tier performance in online RL training. On comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, Intern-S1 demonstrates competitive performance on general reasoning tasks among open-source models and significantly outperforms open-source models in scientific domains, surpassing closed-source state-of-the-art models in professional tasks, such as molecular synthesis planning, reaction condition prediction, predicting thermodynamic stabilities for crystals. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/internlm/Intern-S1.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a standard framework for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, combining large language models (LLMs) with document retrieval from external corpora. Despite its widespread use, most RAG pipelines continue to treat retrieval and reasoning as isolated components, retrieving documents once and then generating answers without further interaction. This static design often limits performance on complex tasks that require iterative evidence gathering or high-precision retrieval. Recent work in both the information retrieval (IR) and NLP communities has begun to close this gap by introducing adaptive retrieval and ranking methods that incorporate feedback. In this survey, we present a structured overview of advanced retrieval and ranking mechanisms that integrate such feedback. We categorize feedback signals based on their source and role in improving the query, retrieved context, or document pool. By consolidating these developments, we aim to bridge IR and NLP perspectives and highlight retrieval as a dynamic, learnable component of end-to-end RAG systems.