Large Language Model
DCL-SE: Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Spatiotemporal Encoding of Brain Imaging
Zhou, Meihua, Tong, Xinyu, Zhao, Jiarui, Cheng, Min, Yang, Li, Tian, Lei, Wan, Nan
High-dimensional neuroimaging analyses for clinical diagnosis are often constrained by compromises in spatiotemporal fidelity and by the limited adaptability of large-scale, general-purpose models. To address these challenges, we introduce Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Spatiotemporal Encoding (DCL-SE), an end-to-end framework centered on data-driven spatiotemporal encoding (DaSE). We leverage Approximate Rank Pooling (ARP) to efficiently encode three-dimensional volumetric brain data into information-rich, two-dimensional dynamic representations, and then employ a dynamic curriculum learning strategy, guided by a Dynamic Group Mechanism (DGM), to progressively train the decoder, refining feature extraction from global anatomical structures to fine pathological details. Evaluated across six publicly available datasets, including Alzheimer's disease and brain tumor classification, cerebral artery segmentation, and brain age prediction, DCL-SE consistently outperforms existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability. These findings underscore the critical importance of compact, task-specific architectures in the era of large-scale pretrained networks.
Parameter Importance-Driven Continual Learning for Foundation Models
Wang, Lingxiang, Zhang, Hainan, Zheng, Zhiming
Domain-specific post-training often causes catastrophic forgetting, making foundation models lose their general reasoning ability and limiting their adaptability to dynamic real-world environments. Preserving general capabilities while acquiring downstream domain knowledge is a central challenge for large language and multimodal models. Traditional continual learning methods, such as regularization, replay and architectural isolation, suffer from poor downstream performance, reliance on inaccessible historical data, or additional parameter overhead. While recent parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods can alleviate forgetting, their effectiveness strongly depends on the choice of parameters and update strategies. In this paper, we introduce PIECE, a Parameter Importance Estimation-based Continual Enhancement method that preserves general ability while efficiently learning domain knowledge without accessing prior training data or increasing model parameters. PIECE selectively updates only 0.1% of core parameters most relevant to new tasks, guided by two importance estimators: PIECE-F based on Fisher Information, and PIECE-S based on a second-order normalization that combines gradient and curvature information. Experiments across three language models and two multimodal models show that PIECE maintains general capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art continual learning performance across diverse downstream tasks. Our results highlight a practical path to scalable, domain-adaptive foundation models without catastrophic forgetting.
In-N-On: Scaling Egocentric Manipulation with in-the-wild and on-task Data
Cai, Xiongyi, Qiu, Ri-Zhao, Chen, Geng, Wei, Lai, Liu, Isabella, Huang, Tianshu, Cheng, Xuxin, Wang, Xiaolong
Egocentric videos are a valuable and scalable data source to learn manipulation policies. However, due to significant data heterogeneity, most existing approaches utilize human data for simple pre-training, which does not unlock its full potential. This paper first provides a scalable recipe for collecting and using egocentric data by categorizing human data into two categories: in-the-wild and on-task alongside with systematic analysis on how to use the data. We first curate a dataset, PHSD, which contains over 1,000 hours of diverse in-the-wild egocentric data and over 20 hours of on-task data directly aligned to the target manipulation tasks. This enables learning a large egocentric language-conditioned flow matching policy, Human0. With domain adaptation techniques, Human0 minimizes the gap between humans and humanoids. Empirically, we show Human0 achieves several novel properties from scaling human data, including language following of instructions from only human data, few-shot learning, and improved robustness using on-task data. Project website: https://xiongyicai.github.io/In-N-On/
Joint Semantic-Channel Coding and Modulation for Token Communications
Ying, Jingkai, Qin, Zhijin, Feng, Yulong, Wang, Liejun, Tao, Xiaoming
In recent years, the Transformer architecture has achieved outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks and modalities. Token is the unified input and output representation in Transformer-based models, which has become a fundamental information unit. In this work, we consider the problem of token communication, studying how to transmit tokens efficiently and reliably. Point cloud, a prevailing three-dimensional format which exhibits a more complex spatial structure compared to image or video, is chosen to be the information source. We utilize the set abstraction method to obtain point tokens. Subsequently, to get a more informative and transmission-friendly representation based on tokens, we propose a joint semantic-channel and modulation (JSCCM) scheme for the token encoder, mapping point tokens to standard digital constellation points (modulated tokens). Specifically, the JSCCM consists of two parallel Point Transformer-based encoders and a differential modulator which combines the Gumel-softmax and soft quantization methods. Besides, the rate allocator and channel adapter are developed, facilitating adaptive generation of high-quality modulated tokens conditioned on both semantic information and channel conditions. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms both joint semantic-channel coding and traditional separate coding, achieving over 1dB gain in reconstruction and more than 6x compression ratio in modulated symbols.
RescueLens: LLM-Powered Triage and Action on Volunteer Feedback for Food Rescue
Raman, Naveen, Tang, Jingwu, Chen, Zhiyu, Shi, Zheyuan Ryan, Hudson, Sean, Kapoor, Ameesh, Fang, Fei
Food rescue organizations simultaneously tackle food insecurity and waste by working with volunteers to redistribute food from donors who have excess to recipients who need it. Volunteer feedback allows food rescue organizations to identify issues early and ensure volunteer satisfaction. However, food rescue organizations monitor feedback manually, which can be cumbersome and labor-intensive, making it difficult to prioritize which issues are most important. In this work, we investigate how large language models (LLMs) assist food rescue organizers in understanding and taking action based on volunteer experiences. We work with 412 Food Rescue, a large food rescue organization based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to design RescueLens, an LLM-powered tool that automatically categorizes volunteer feedback, suggests donors and recipients to follow up with, and updates volunteer directions based on feedback. We evaluate the performance of RescueLens on an annotated dataset, and show that it can recover 96% of volunteer issues at 71% precision. Moreover, by ranking donors and recipients according to their rates of volunteer issues, RescueLens allows organizers to focus on 0.5% of donors responsible for more than 30% of volunteer issues. RescueLens is now deployed at 412 Food Rescue and through semi-structured interviews with organizers, we find that RescueLens streamlines the feedback process so organizers better allocate their time.
The Impact of Quantization on Large Reasoning Model Reinforcement Learning
Kumar, Medha, Xu, Zifei, Wang, Xin, Webb, Tristan
Strong reasoning capabilities can now be achieved by large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without any supervised fine-tuning. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) are well studied in the context of fine-tuning, how quantization impacts RL in large reasoning models (LRMs) remains an open question. To answer this question, we conducted systematic experiments and discovered a significant gap in reasoning performance on mathematical benchmarks between post-RL quantized models and their quantization-aware RL optimized counterparts. Our findings suggest that quantization-aware RL training negatively impacted the learning process, whereas PTQ and QLoRA led to greater performance.
MoDES: Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models via Dynamic Expert Skipping
Huang, Yushi, Wang, Zining, Yuan, Zhihang, Ding, Yifu, Gong, Ruihao, Guo, Jinyang, Liu, Xianglong, Zhang, Jun
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at vision-language tasks, but they suffer from high computational inefficiency. To reduce inference overhead, expert skipping methods have been proposed to deactivate redundant experts based on the current input tokens. However, we find that applying these methods-originally designed for unimodal large language models (LLMs)-to MLLMs results in considerable performance degradation. This is primarily because such methods fail to account for the heterogeneous contributions of experts across MoE layers and modality-specific behaviors of tokens within these layers. Motivated by these findings, we propose MoDES, the first training-free framework that adaptively skips experts to enable efficient and accurate MoE MLLM inference. It incorporates a globally-modulated local gating (GMLG) mechanism that integrates global layer-wise importance into local routing probabilities to accurately estimate per-token expert importance. A dual-modality thresholding (DMT) method is then applied, which processes tokens from each modality separately, to derive the skipping schedule. To set the optimal thresholds, we introduce a frontier search algorithm that exploits monotonicity properties, cutting convergence time from several days to a few hours. Extensive experiments for 3 model series across 13 benchmarks demonstrate that MoDES far outperforms previous approaches. For instance, when skipping 88% experts for Qwen3-VL-MoE-30B-A3B-Instruct, the performance boost is up to 10.67% (97.33% vs. 86.66%). Furthermore, MoDES significantly enhances inference speed, improving the prefilling time by 2.16$\times$ and the decoding time by 1.26$\times$.
Exploration of Summarization by Generative Language Models for Automated Scoring of Long Essays
Hua, Haowei, Jiao, Hong, Wang, Xinyi
The majority of summarized essays fall well below the 512 - token limit (marked by the red dashed line), indicating that the summarization process effectively compressed the original texts while maintaining consistency in length. The smooth decline beyond 300 tokens and the sparse occurrence of samples approaching the upper l imit suggest that v ery few summaries exceeded the intended compression threshold. Overall, this distribution demonstrates that the GPT - 5 - mini summarizer produced concise and length - stable representations, ensuring efficient model input handling and minimizing the risk of truncation in downstream processing.
Automating Android Build Repair: Bridging the Reasoning-Execution Gap in LLM Agents with Domain-Specific Tools
Son, Ha Min, Ren, Huan, Liu, Xin, Zhao, Zhe
Android is the largest mobile platform, yet automatically building applications remains a practical challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for code repair, their use for fixing Android build errors remains underexplored. To address this gap, we first introduce AndroidBuildBench, a benchmark of 1,019 build failures curated from the commit histories of 43 open-source Android projects. Each problem is paired with a verified solution from a subsequent commit, ensuring that fixes are feasible. Second, we propose GradleFixer, an LLM agent with domain-specific tools for inspecting and manipulating the Gradle build environment. GradleFixer achieves a resolve rate of 81.4% (pass@1), significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art coding agent that relies on a general-purpose shell. GradleFixer's success suggests that while LLMs possess the high-level knowledge to solve these failures, they struggle to translate this knowledge into effective low-level actions using a general-purpose shell. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a strategy we term Tool Bridging, which replaces general-purpose shell commands with domain-aware abstractions. We hypothesize this approach works through two mechanisms: 1) it provides tools in an API-like format that LLMs use more reliably, and 2) it constrains the action space to relevant operations. This approach bridges the gap between the model's high-level reasoning and effective low-level execution.
HSKBenchmark: Modeling and Benchmarking Chinese Second Language Acquisition in Large Language Models through Curriculum Tuning
Yang, Qihao, Wang, Xuelin, Chen, Jiale, Dong, Xuelian, Hao, Yuxin, Hao, Tianyong
Language acquisition is vital to revealing the nature of human language intelligence and has recently emerged as a promising perspective for improving the interpretability of large language models (LLMs). However, it is ethically and practically infeasible to conduct experiments that require controlling human learners' language inputs. This poses challenges for the verifiability and scalability of language acquisition modeling, particularly in Chinese second language acquisition (SLA). While LLMs provide a controllable and reproducible alternative, a systematic benchmark to support phase-wise modeling and assessment is still lacking. In this paper, we present HSKBenchmark, the first benchmark for staged modeling and writing assessment of LLMs in Chinese SLA. It covers HSK levels 3 to 6 and includes authentic textbooks with 6.76 million tokens, 16K synthetic instruction samples, 30 test topics, and a linguistically grounded evaluation system. To simulate human learning trajectories, we introduce a curriculum-tuning framework that trains models from beginner to advanced levels. An evaluation system is created to examine level-based grammar coverage, writing errors, lexical and syntactic complexity, and holistic scoring. We also build HSKAgent, fine-tuned on 10K learner compositions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HSKBenchmark not only models Chinese SLA effectively, but also serves as a reliable benchmark for dynamic writing assessment in LLMs. Our fine-tuned LLMs have writing performance on par with advanced human learners and exhibit human-like acquisition characteristics. The HSKBenchmark, HSKAgent, and checkpoints serve as foundational tools and resources, with the potential to pave the way for future research on language acquisition modeling and LLMs interpretability. Code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/CharlesYang030/HSKB.