Test-time adaptation allows pretrained models to adjust to incoming data streams, addressing distribution shifts between source and target domains. However, standard methods rely on single-dimensional linear classification layers, which often fail to handle diverse and complex shifts. We propose Hierarchical Adaptive Networks with Task Vectors (Hi-Vec), which leverages multiple layers of increasing size for dynamic test-time adaptation. By decomposing the encoder's representation space into such hierarchically organized layers, Hi-Vec, in a plug-and-play manner, allows existing methods to adapt to shifts of varying complexity. Our contributions are threefold: First, we propose dynamic layer selection for automatic identification of the optimal layer for adaptation to each test batch. Second, we propose a mechanism that merges weights from the dynamic layer to other layers, ensuring all layers receive target information. Third, we propose linear layer agreement that acts as a gating function, preventing erroneous fine-tuning by adaptation on noisy batches. We rigorously evaluate the performance of Hi-Vec in challenging scenarios and on multiple target datasets, proving its strong capability to advance state-of-the-art methods. Our results show that Hi-Vec improves robustness, addresses uncertainty, and handles limited batch sizes and increased outlier rates.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are widely used in vision-language reasoning tasks. However, their vulnerability to adversarial prompts remains a serious concern, as safety mechanisms often fail to prevent the generation of harmful outputs. Although recent jailbreak strategies report high success rates, many responses classified as "successful" are actually benign, vague, or unrelated to the intended malicious goal. This mismatch suggests that current evaluation standards may overestimate the effectiveness of such attacks. To address this issue, we introduce a four-axis evaluation framework that considers input on-topicness, input out-of-distribution (OOD) intensity, output harmfulness, and output refusal rate. This framework identifies truly effective jailbreaks. In a substantial empirical study, we reveal a structural trade-off: highly on-topic prompts are frequently blocked by safety filters, whereas those that are too OOD often evade detection but fail to produce harmful content. However, prompts that balance relevance and novelty are more likely to evade filters and trigger dangerous output. Building on this insight, we develop a recursive rewriting strategy called Balanced Structural Decomposition (BSD). The approach restructures malicious prompts into semantically aligned sub-tasks, while introducing subtle OOD signals and visual cues that make the inputs harder to detect. BSD was tested across 13 commercial and open-source MLLMs, where it consistently led to higher attack success rates, more harmful outputs, and fewer refusals. Compared to previous methods, it improves success rates by $67\%$ and harmfulness by $21\%$, revealing a previously underappreciated weakness in current multimodal safety systems.

While analysing rare blood cell aggregates remains challenging in automated h aematology, they could markedly advance label - free functional diagnostics. Conventional flow cytometers efficiently perform cell counting with leukocyte differentials but fail to identify aggregates with flagged results, requiring manual reviews. Quantitat ive phase imaging flow cytometry captures detailed aggregate morphologies, but clinical use is hampered by massive data storage and offline processing. Incorporating "hidden" biom arkers into routine haematology panels would significantly improve diagnostics with out flagged results. We present RT - HAD, a n end - to - end deep learning - based image and data processing framework for off - axis digital holographic microscopy (DHM), which combines physics - consistent holographic reconstruction and detection, represent ing each blood cell in a graph to recognize aggregates . RT - HAD processes >30 GB of image data on - the - fly with turnaround time of <1.5 min and error rate of 8.9% in platelet aggregate detection, which matches acceptable laboratory error rates of haematology biomarkers and solves the "big data" challenge for point - of - care diagnostics .

Deep generative models open new avenues for simulating realistic genomic data while preserving privacy and addressing data accessibility constraints. While previous studies have primarily focused on generating gene expression or haplotype data, this study explores generating genotype data in both unconditioned and phenotype-conditioned settings, which is inherently more challenging due to the discrete nature of genotype data. In this work, we developed and evaluated commonly used generative models, including Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Diffusion Models, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and proposed adaptation tailored to discrete genotype data. We conducted extensive experiments on large-scale datasets, including all chromosomes from cow and multiple chromosomes from human. Model performance was assessed using a well-established set of metrics drawn from both deep learning and quantitative genetics literature. Our results show that these models can effectively capture genetic patterns and preserve genotype-phenotype association. Our findings provide a comprehensive comparison of these models and offer practical guidelines for future research in genotype simulation. We have made our code publicly available at https://github.com/SihanXXX/DiscreteGenoGen.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have catalyzed transformative progress in affective computing, enabling models to exhibit emergent emotional intelligence. Despite substantial methodological progress, current emotional benchmarks remain limited, as it is still unknown: (a) the generalization abilities of MLLMs across distinct scenarios, and (b) their reasoning capabilities to identify the triggering factors behind emotional states. To bridge these gaps, we present \textbf{MME-Emotion}, a systematic benchmark that assesses both emotional understanding and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, enjoying \textit{scalable capacity}, \textit{diverse settings}, and \textit{unified protocols}. As the largest emotional intelligence benchmark for MLLMs, MME-Emotion contains over 6,000 curated video clips with task-specific questioning-answering (QA) pairs, spanning broad scenarios to formulate eight emotional tasks. It further incorporates a holistic evaluation suite with hybrid metrics for emotion recognition and reasoning, analyzed through a multi-agent system framework. Through a rigorous evaluation of 20 advanced MLLMs, we uncover both their strengths and limitations, yielding several key insights: \ding{182} Current MLLMs exhibit unsatisfactory emotional intelligence, with the best-performing model achieving only $39.3\%$ recognition score and $56.0\%$ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) score on our benchmark. \ding{183} Generalist models (\emph{e.g.}, Gemini-2.5-Pro) derive emotional intelligence from generalized multimodal understanding capabilities, while specialist models (\emph{e.g.}, R1-Omni) can achieve comparable performance through domain-specific post-training adaptation. By introducing MME-Emotion, we hope that it can serve as a foundation for advancing MLLMs' emotional intelligence in the future.

Construction safety research is a critical field in civil engineering, aiming to mitigate risks and prevent injuries through the analysis of site conditions and human factors. However, the limited volume and lack of diversity in existing construction safety datasets pose significant challenges to conducting in-depth analyses. To address this research gap, this paper introduces the Construction Safety Dataset (CSDataset), a well-organized comprehensive multi-level dataset that encompasses incidents, inspections, and violations recorded sourced from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). This dataset uniquely integrates structured attributes with unstructured narratives, facilitating a wide range of approaches driven by machine learning and large language models. We also conduct a preliminary approach benchmarking and various cross-level analyses using our dataset, offering insights to inform and enhance future efforts in construction safety. For example, we found that complaint-driven inspections were associated with a 17.3% reduction in the likelihood of subsequent incidents. Our dataset and code are released at https://github.com/zhenhuiou/Construction-Safety-Dataset-CSDataset.

Future 6G radio access networks (RANs) will be artificial intelligence (AI)-native: observed, reasoned about, and re-configured by autonomous agents cooperating across the cloud-edge continuum. We introduce MX-AI, the first end-to-end agentic system that (i) instruments a live 5G Open RAN testbed based on OpenAirInterface (OAI) and FlexRIC, (ii) deploys a graph of Large-Language-Model (LLM)-powered agents inside the Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) layer, and (iii) exposes both observability and control functions for 6G RAN resources through natural-language intents. On 50 realistic operational queries, MX-AI attains a mean answer quality of 4.1/5.0 and 100 % decision-action accuracy, while incurring only 8.8 seconds end-to-end latency when backed by GPT-4.1. Thus, it matches human-expert performance, validating its practicality in real settings. We publicly release the agent graph, prompts, and evaluation harness to accelerate open research on AI-native RANs. A live demo is presented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEIya7988Ug&t=285s&ab_channel=BubbleRAN

The deployment of large-scale models, such as large language models (LLMs), incurs substantial costs due to their computational demands. To mitigate these costs and address challenges related to scalability and data security, there is a growing shift towards decentralized systems for model deployment, where choosing efficient inference acceleration schemes become crucial to manage computational resources effectively and enhance system responsiveness. In this work, we address the challenge of selecting optimal acceleration methods in decentralized systems by introducing a meta-learning-based framework. This framework automates the selection process by learning from historical performance data of various acceleration techniques across different tasks. Unlike traditional methods that rely on random selection or expert intuition, our approach systematically identifies the best acceleration strategies based on the specific characteristics of each task. We demonstrate that our meta-learning framework not only streamlines the decision-making process but also consistently outperforms conventional methods in terms of efficiency and performance. Our results highlight the potential of inference acceleration in decentralized AI systems, offering a path towards more democratic and economically feasible artificial intelligence solutions.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs for text generation, with the potential to decode multiple tokens in a single iteration. However, none of the existing open-source dLLMs have achieved superior inference speed over AR LLMs of similar size. This paper breaks this barrier based on a simple and effective strategy named discrete diffusion forcing (D2F). D2F equips dLLMs with two key capabilities: (1) block-wise autoregressive generation to enable KV cache utilization; (2) prediction of following tokens without requiring completion of prior blocks for inter-block parallel decoding. In this way, the vanilla dLLMs are refurbished into an AR-diffusion hybrid paradigm for efficient inference. D2F can be implemented with an asymmetric distillation process based on pre-trained dLLMs. We further propose a pipelined parallel decoding algorithm, which enables a trade-off between efficiency and efficacy. Empirically, D2F dLLMs achieve more than $\mathbf{2.5\times}$ inference speed than LLaMA3 and Qwen2.5 on GSM8K. Compared to vanilla dLLMs like LLaDA and Dream, the acceleration can be more than $\mathbf{50\times}$ while maintaining comparable output quality. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/Discrete-Diffusion-Forcing.

Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, an LLM-driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained large language model (LLM), further optimized with autore-gressive generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets enriched with contextual features demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of TokenCast.