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Xuanwu: Evolving General Multimodal Models into an Industrial-Grade Foundation for Content Ecosystems

arXiv:2603.29211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large models have continued to improve on general benchmarks. However, in real-world content moderation and adversarial settings, mainstream models still suffer from degraded generalization and catastrophic forgetting because of limited fine-grained visual perception and insufficient modeling of long-tail noise. In this paper, we present Xuanwu VL-2B as a case study of how general multimodal models can be developed into an industrial-grade foundation model for content ecosystems. The model adopts a compact InternViT-300M + MLP + Qwen3 1.7B architecture, balancing fine-grained visual perception, language-semantic alignment, and deployment cost within an approximately 2B-parameter budget. To balance business specialization with the retention of general capabilities, we developed a data iteration and curation mechanism and trained the model through a progressive three-stage pipeline: pre-training, mid-training, and post-training. Ablation studies and offline business evaluations show that Xuanwu VL-2B achieves an average score of 67.90 across seven OpenCompass multimodal metrics (vs. 64.27 for InternVL 3.5 2B), an average recall of 94.38% over seven independent business moderation tasks, and a weighted overall recall of 82.82% on policy-violating text in challenging adversarial OCR scenarios, outperforming Gemini-2.5-Pro (76.72%). These results show that, under a limited parameter budget, Xuanwu VL-2B achieves a practical balance among business alignment, visual perception, general capability retention, and deployment cost.

The Model Says Walk: How Surface Heuristics Override Implicit Constraints in LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2603.29025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models systematically fail when a salient surface cue conflicts with an unstated feasibility constraint. We study this through a diagnose-measure-bridge-treat framework. Causal-behavioral analysis of the ``car wash problem'' across six models reveals approximately context-independent sigmoid heuristics: the distance cue exerts 8.7 to 38 times more influence than the goal, and token-level attribution shows patterns more consistent with keyword associations than compositional inference. The Heuristic Override Benchmark (HOB) -- 500 instances spanning 4 heuristic by 5 constraint families with minimal pairs and explicitness gradients -- demonstrates generality across 14 models: under strict evaluation (10/10 correct), no model exceeds 75%, and presence constraints are hardest (44%). A minimal hint (e.g., emphasizing the key object) recovers +15 pp on average, suggesting the failure lies in constraint inference rather than missing knowledge; 12/14 models perform worse when the constraint is removed (up to -39 pp), revealing conservative bias. Parametric probes confirm that the sigmoid pattern generalizes to cost, efficiency, and semantic-similarity heuristics; goal-decomposition prompting recovers +6 to 9 pp by forcing models to enumerate preconditions before answering. Together, these results characterize heuristic override as a systematic reasoning vulnerability and provide a benchmark for measuring progress toward resolving it.

Electric dipole moment drives the dynamics of the TNFR1 complex I signalosome

Nature, Published online: 01 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10304-1

Long-range interactions mediated by protein electric dipole moments have a role in driving the assembly and disassembly of super-signalling complex I for promoting NF-κB signalling.

Integrative Multi-omics Analysis of Buti Huatan Tang in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

J Vis Exp. 2026 Mar 13;(229). doi: 10.3791/70383.

ABSTRACT

This study utilized a multi-omics and computational biology framework to investigate the therapeutic potential of the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) formula Buti Huatan Tang (BTHTT) against chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Significant physiological improvements were observed in a rat model following BTHTT intervention. Histological analysis showed a reversal of lung pathological damage, while biochemical assays, and transcriptomics confirmed the normalization of IL-1β and IL-1R2 levels. Additionally, metabolic profiling revealed that BTHTT corrected disruptions in T3 and T4 thyroid hormone levels. A negative correlation was observed between the IL-1β/IL-1R2 axis and these thyroid hormones, indicating that their regulation is associated with the formula's therapeutic effect. Beyond direct measurements, machine learning algorithms identified ten COPD signature genes from clinical databases. Pathway enrichment analysis suggests that BTHTT may act through cytokine-cytokine-receptor interactions and thyroid hormone synthesis pathways. Furthermore, while 283 components were identified in vivo, compounds such as tanshinone IIA and cryptotanshinone are currently considered candidate active substances. Their role as primary drivers is supported by a model in which they stably bind to IL-1R2; this inference is based on molecular docking and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations rather than direct experimental isolation. Overall, the data support a model in which BTHTT exerts a multi-target effect on COPD by modulating inflammation and metabolic homeostasis. This integrated approach provides a refined scientific basis for the clinical application of BTHTT and highlights specific pathways for future experimental validation.

PMID:41911070 | DOI:10.3791/70383

Integrative Multi-omics Analysis of Buti Huatan Tang in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

J Vis Exp. 2026 Mar 13;(229). doi: 10.3791/70383.

ABSTRACT

This study utilized a multi-omics and computational biology framework to investigate the therapeutic potential of the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) formula Buti Huatan Tang (BTHTT) against chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Significant physiological improvements were observed in a rat model following BTHTT intervention. Histological analysis showed a reversal of lung pathological damage, while biochemical assays, and transcriptomics confirmed the normalization of IL-1β and IL-1R2 levels. Additionally, metabolic profiling revealed that BTHTT corrected disruptions in T3 and T4 thyroid hormone levels. A negative correlation was observed between the IL-1β/IL-1R2 axis and these thyroid hormones, indicating that their regulation is associated with the formula's therapeutic effect. Beyond direct measurements, machine learning algorithms identified ten COPD signature genes from clinical databases. Pathway enrichment analysis suggests that BTHTT may act through cytokine-cytokine-receptor interactions and thyroid hormone synthesis pathways. Furthermore, while 283 components were identified in vivo, compounds such as tanshinone IIA and cryptotanshinone are currently considered candidate active substances. Their role as primary drivers is supported by a model in which they stably bind to IL-1R2; this inference is based on molecular docking and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations rather than direct experimental isolation. Overall, the data support a model in which BTHTT exerts a multi-target effect on COPD by modulating inflammation and metabolic homeostasis. This integrated approach provides a refined scientific basis for the clinical application of BTHTT and highlights specific pathways for future experimental validation.

PMID:41911070 | DOI:10.3791/70383

A multicenter randomized clinical trial of portable transcranial alternating current stimulation for major depressive disorder

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 28 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-02575-9

A multicenter randomized clinical trial of portable transcranial alternating current stimulation for major depressive disorder

DreamAudio: Customized Text-to-Audio Generation with Diffusion Models

arXiv:2509.06027v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the development of large-scale diffusion-based and language-modeling-based generative models, impressive progress has been achieved in text-to-audio generation. Despite producing high-quality outputs, existing text-to-audio models mainly aim to generate semantically aligned sound and fall short of controlling fine-grained acoustic characteristics of specific sounds. As a result, users who need specific sound content may find it difficult to generate the desired audio clips. In this paper, we present DreamAudio for customized text-to-audio generation (CTTA). Specifically, we introduce a new framework that is designed to enable the model to identify auditory information from user-provided reference concepts for audio generation. Given a few reference audio samples containing personalized audio events, our system can generate new audio samples that include these specific events. In addition, two types of datasets are developed for training and testing the proposed systems. The experiments show that DreamAudio generates audio samples that are highly consistent with the customized audio features and aligned well with the input text prompts. Furthermore, DreamAudio offers comparable performance in general text-to-audio tasks. We also provide a human-involved dataset containing audio events from real-world CTTA cases as the benchmark for customized generation tasks.

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.

Deep Expert Injection for Anchoring Retinal VLMs with Domain-Specific Knowledge

arXiv:2603.07131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) show immense potential for automated ophthalmic diagnosis. However, their clinical deployment is severely hindered by lacking domain-specific knowledge. In this work, we identify two structural deficiencies hindering reliable medical reasoning: 1) the Perception Gap, where general-purpose visual encoders fail to resolve fine-grained pathological cues (e.g., microaneurysms); and 2) the Reasoning Gap, where sparse visual evidence is progressively overridden by massive language priors in deeper transformer layers, leading to ungrounded hallucinations. To bridge these gaps, we propose EyExIn, a data-efficient framework designed to anchor retinal VLMs with expert knowledge via a Deep Expert Injection mechanism. Our architecture employs an Expert-Aware Dual-Stream encoding strategy that decouples visual representation into a general stream for anatomical context and a specialized expert stream for pathological semantics. To ensure high-fidelity integration, we design a Semantic-Adaptive Gated Fusion module, which dynamically amplifies subtle lesion signals while filtering irrelevant background noise. Furthermore, we introduce Adaptive Deep Expert Injection to embed persistent "Vision Anchors" by integrating fused visual features as residual biases directly into intermediate LLM layers. This mechanism creates a visual shortcut that forces the reasoning stack to remain strictly grounded in visual evidence. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms massive proprietary systems. EyExIn significantly enhances domain-specific knowledge embedding and achieves state-of-the-art precision in ophthalmic visual question answering, advancing the development of trustworthy ophthalmic AI.

Think, Speak, Decide: Language-Augmented Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Economic Decision-Making

arXiv:2511.12876v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Economic decision-making depends not only on structured signals such as prices and taxes, but also on unstructured language, including peer dialogue and media narratives. While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown promise in optimizing economic decisions, it struggles with the semantic ambiguity and contextual richness of language. We propose LAMP (Language-Augmented Multi-Agent Policy), a framework that integrates language into economic decision-making and narrows the gap to real-world settings. LAMP follows a Think-Speak-Decide pipeline: (1) Think interprets numerical observations to extract short-term shocks and long-term trends, caching high-value reasoning trajectories; (2) Speak crafts and exchanges strategic messages based on reasoning, updating beliefs by parsing peer communications; and (3) Decide fuses numerical data, reasoning, and reflections into a MARL policy to optimize language-augmented decision-making. Experiments in economic simulation show that LAMP outperforms both MARL and LLM-only baselines in cumulative return (+63.5%, +34.0%), robustness (+18.8%, +59.4%), and interpretability. These results demonstrate the potential of language-augmented policies to deliver more effective and robust economic strategies.

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.

Arginine methylation-dependent stabilization of SUV39H1 promotes breast cancer growth

Oncogene, Published online: 07 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03712-0

Arginine methylation-dependent stabilization of SUV39H1 promotes breast cancer growth

Towards Realistic Personalization: Evaluating Long-Horizon Preference Following in Personalized User-LLM Interactions

arXiv:2603.04191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as personal assistants, where users share complex and diverse preferences over extended interactions. However, assessing how well LLMs can follow these preferences in realistic, long-term situations remains underexplored. This work proposes RealPref, a benchmark for evaluating realistic preference-following in personalized user-LLM interactions. RealPref features 100 user profiles, 1300 personalized preferences, four types of preference expression (ranging from explicit to implicit), and long-horizon interaction histories. It includes three types of test questions (multiple-choice, true-or-false, and open-ended), with detailed rubrics for LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. Results indicate that LLM performance significantly drops as context length grows and preference expression becomes more implicit, and that generalizing user preference understanding to unseen scenarios poses further challenges. RealPref and these findings provide a foundation for future research to develop user-aware LLM assistants that better adapt to individual needs. The code is available at https://github.com/GG14127/RealPref.

Pretrained Vision-Language-Action Models are Surprisingly Resistant to Forgetting in Continual Learning

arXiv:2603.03818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning is a long-standing challenge in robot policy learning, where a policy must acquire new skills over time without catastrophically forgetting previously learned ones. While prior work has extensively studied continual learning in relatively small behavior cloning (BC) policy models trained from scratch, its behavior in modern large-scale pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains underexplored. In this work, we found that pretrained VLAs are remarkably resistant to forgetting compared with smaller policy models trained from scratch. Simple Experience Replay (ER) works surprisingly well on VLAs, sometimes achieving zero forgetting even with a small replay data size. Our analysis reveals that pretraining plays a critical role in downstream continual learning performance: large pretrained models mitigate forgetting with a small replay buffer size while maintaining strong forward learning capabilities. Furthermore, we found that VLAs can retain relevant knowledge from prior tasks despite performance degradation during learning new tasks. This knowledge retention enables rapid recovery of seemingly forgotten skills through finetuning. Together, these insights imply that large-scale pretraining fundamentally changes the dynamics of continual learning, enabling models to continually acquire new skills over time with simple replay. Code and more information can be found at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/continual-vla
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  • ToolRLA: Multiplicative Reward Decomposition for Tool-Integrated Agents Pengbo Liu
    arXiv:2603.01620v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tool-integrated agents that interleave reasoning with API calls are promising for complex tasks, yet aligning them for high-stakes, domain-specific deployment remains challenging: existing reinforcement learning approaches rely on coarse binary rewards that cannot distinguish tool selection errors from malformed parameters. We present ToolRLA, a three-stage post-training pipeline (SFT $\rightarrow$ GRPO $\rightarrow$ DPO) for domain-specific t
     

ToolRLA: Multiplicative Reward Decomposition for Tool-Integrated Agents

arXiv:2603.01620v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tool-integrated agents that interleave reasoning with API calls are promising for complex tasks, yet aligning them for high-stakes, domain-specific deployment remains challenging: existing reinforcement learning approaches rely on coarse binary rewards that cannot distinguish tool selection errors from malformed parameters. We present ToolRLA, a three-stage post-training pipeline (SFT $\rightarrow$ GRPO $\rightarrow$ DPO) for domain-specific tool agents. The core contribution is a fine-grained reward function with multiplicative correctness decomposition spanning four dimensions -- format validity, tool selection, parameter accuracy, and regulatory compliance -- that encodes domain priority orderings as inductive biases in the reward landscape. Deployed on a financial advisory copilot (80+ advisors, 1,200+ daily queries), ToolRLA achieves over three months: a 47\% improvement in task completion rate ($62\%\rightarrow91\%$), a 63\% reduction in tool invocation errors ($38\%\rightarrow14\%$), and a 93\% reduction in regulatory violations ($12\%\rightarrow0.8\%$), within sub-2-second latency. Ablation studies show the multiplicative reward design accounts for 7 percentage points of improvement over additive alternatives. Generalization is further validated on ToolBench and API-Bank.

Vision-Zero: Scalable VLM Self-Improvement via Strategic Gamified Self-Play

arXiv:2509.25541v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Although reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for improving vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), current methods rely heavily on manually curated datasets and costly human verification, which limits scalable self-improvement in multimodal systems. To address this challenge, we propose Vision-Zero, a label-free, domain-agnostic multi-agent self-play framework for self-evolving VLMs through competitive visual games generated from arbitrary image inputs. Specifically, Vision-Zero encompasses three main attributes: (1) Strategic Self-Play Framework: Vision-Zero trains VLMs in "Who Is the Spy"-style games, where the models engage in strategic reasoning and actions across multiple roles. Through interactive gameplay, models autonomously generate their training data without human annotation. (2) Gameplay from Arbitrary Images: Unlike existing gamified frameworks, Vision-Zero can generate games from arbitrary images, thereby enhancing the model's reasoning ability across diverse domains and showing strong generalization to different tasks. We demonstrate this versatility using three distinct types of image datasets: CLEVR-based synthetic scenes, charts, and real-world images. (3) Sustainable Performance Gain: We introduce Iterative Self-Play Policy Optimization (Iterative-SPO), a novel training algorithm that alternates between Self-Play and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), mitigating the performance plateau often seen in self-play-only training and achieving sustained long-term improvements. Despite using label-free data, Vision-Zero achieves state-of-the-art performance on reasoning, chart question answering, and vision-centric understanding tasks, surpassing other annotation-based methods. Models and code have been released at https://github.com/wangqinsi1/Vision-Zero.

UniG2U-Bench: Do Unified Models Advance Multimodal Understanding?

arXiv:2603.03241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models have recently demonstrated strong generative capabilities, yet whether and when generation improves understanding remains unclear. Existing benchmarks lack a systematic exploration of the specific tasks where generation facilitates understanding. To this end, we introduce UniG2U-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark categorizing generation-to-understanding (G2U) evaluation into 7 regimes and 30 subtasks, requiring varying degrees of implicit or explicit visual transformations. Extensive evaluation of over 30 models reveals three core findings: 1) Unified models generally underperform their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and Generate-then-Answer (GtA) inference typically degrades performance relative to direct inference. 2) Consistent enhancements emerge in spatial intelligence, visual illusions, or multi-round reasoning subtasks, where enhanced spatial and shape perception, as well as multi-step intermediate image states, prove beneficial. 3) Tasks with similar reasoning structures and models sharing architectures exhibit correlated behaviors, suggesting that generation-understanding coupling induces class-consistent inductive biases over tasks, pretraining data, and model architectures. These findings highlight the necessity for more diverse training data and novel paradigms to fully unlock the potential of unified multimodal modeling.

xLLM Technical Report

arXiv:2510.14686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce xLLM, an intelligent and efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference framework designed for high-performance, large-scale enterprise-grade serving, with deep optimizations for diverse AI accelerators. To address these challenges, xLLM builds a novel decoupled service-engine architecture. At the service layer, xLLM-Service features an intelligent scheduling module that efficiently processes multimodal requests and co-locates online and offline tasks through unified elastic scheduling to maximize cluster utilization. This module also relies on a workload-adaptive dynamic Prefill-Decode (PD) disaggregation policy and a novel Encode-Prefill-Decode (EPD) disaggregation policy designed for multimodal inputs. Furthermore, it incorporates a distributed architecture to provide global KV Cache management and robust fault-tolerant capabilities for high availability. At the engine layer, xLLM-Engine co-optimizes system and algorithm designs to fully saturate computing resources. This is achieved through comprehensive multi-layer execution pipeline optimizations, an adaptive graph mode and an xTensor memory management. xLLM-Engine also further integrates algorithmic enhancements such as optimized speculative decoding and dynamic EPLB, collectively serving to substantially boost throughput and inference efficiency. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that xLLM delivers significantly superior performance and resource efficiency. Under identical TPOT constraints, xLLM achieves throughput up to 1.7x that of MindIE and 2.2x that of vLLM-Ascend with Qwen-series models, while maintaining an average throughput of 1.7x that of MindIE with Deepseek-series models. xLLM framework is publicly available at https://github.com/jd-opensource/xllm and https://github.com/jd-opensource/xllm-service.

Synthesizing Multimodal Geometry Datasets from Scratch and Enabling Visual Alignment via Plotting Code

arXiv:2602.18745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal geometry reasoning requires models to jointly understand visual diagrams and perform structured symbolic inference, yet current vision--language models struggle with complex geometric constructions due to limited training data and weak visual--symbolic alignment. We propose a pipeline for synthesizing complex multimodal geometry problems from scratch and construct a dataset named \textbf{GeoCode}, which decouples problem generation into symbolic seed construction, grounded instantiation with verification, and code-based diagram rendering, ensuring consistency across structure, text, reasoning, and images. Leveraging the plotting code provided in GeoCode, we further introduce code prediction as an explicit alignment objective, transforming visual understanding into a supervised structured prediction task. GeoCode exhibits substantially higher structural complexity and reasoning difficulty than existing benchmarks, while maintaining mathematical correctness through multi-stage validation. Extensive experiments show that models trained on GeoCode achieve consistent improvements on multiple geometry benchmarks, demonstrating both the effectiveness of the dataset and the proposed alignment strategy. The code will be available at https://github.com/would1920/GeoCode.

Towards Reliable Negative Sampling for Recommendation with Implicit Feedback via In-Community Popularity

arXiv:2602.18759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning from implicit feedback is a fundamental problem in modern recommender systems, where only positive interactions are observed and explicit negative signals are unavailable. In such settings, negative sampling plays a critical role in model training by constructing negative items that enable effective preference learning and ranking optimization. However, designing reliable negative sampling strategies remains challenging, as they must simultaneously ensure realness, hardness, and interpretability. To this end, we propose \textbf{ICPNS (In-Community Popularity Negative Sampling)}, a novel framework that leverages user community structure to identify reliable and informative negative samples. Our approach is grounded in the insight that item exposure is driven by latent user communities. By identifying these communities and utilizing in-community popularity, ICPNS effectively approximates the probability of item exposure. Consequently, items that are popular within a user's community but remain unclicked are identified as more reliable true negatives. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that ICPNS yields consistent improvements on graph-based recommenders and competitive performance on MF-based models, outperforming representative negative sampling strategies under a unified evaluation protocol.
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