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InfiniteVL: Synergizing Linear and Sparse Attention for Highly-Efficient, Unlimited-Input Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2512.08829v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly tasked with ultra-long multimodal understanding. While linear architectures offer constant computation and memory footprints, they often struggle with high-frequency visual perception compared to standard Transformers. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{InfiniteVL}. We first develop a hybrid base model called \textbf{InfiniteVL-Base} that interleaves a small fraction of Full Attention layers with Gated DeltaNet. Empowered by a tailored distillation and fine-tuning strategy, InfiniteVL-Base matches the fundamental multimodal performance of equivalent Transformers while achieving a \textbf{1.7$\times$} decoding speedup. However, the quadratic complexity of the retained Full Attention inevitably becomes an efficiency bottleneck when scaling to ultra long context. To break this barrier, we propose a novel Long-Sequence Architectural Fine-Tuning strategy that seamlessly transforms the dense attention into vision-specific sparse mechanisms. This yields two specialized variants: \textbf{InfiniteVL-Offline} for offline retrieval and \textbf{InfiniteVL-Online} for online streaming. By eliminating the computation explosion of global attention without sacrificing high-frequency visual recall, InfiniteVL-Offline achieves Transformer-level length generalization with a \textbf{5x} prefill acceleration at 256K context. Concurrently, InfiniteVL-Online delivers robust streaming perception with a constant memory footprint and a real-time throughput of \textbf{25} FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/InfiniteVL.

Proposed Role of Circadian Clock Genes in Pathogenesis of HCC: Molecular Subtyping and Characterization

Biomedicines. 2026 Mar 12;14(3):645. doi: 10.3390/biomedicines14030645.

ABSTRACT

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) stands as a prevalent global health issue with increasing incidence and mortality rates. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) exhibits profound molecular and clinical heterogeneity, which limits the effectiveness of current therapeutic strategies. Circadian rhythm disruption has been implicated in metabolic reprogramming, proliferation, and immune modulation in cancer, but its role in shaping HCC heterogeneity remains poorly defined. Methods: Four public HCC transcriptomic cohorts (TCGA-LIHC, CHCC, LIRI, LICA) were integrated using RMA normalization and ComBat for batch correction. Consensus clustering based on 31 core circadian clock genes (CCGs) identified robust molecular subtypes. Multi-omics characterization-including genomic alterations, pathway activity (GSEA/GSVA), immune microenvironment profiling (CIBERSORT, EPIC, MCP-counter, xCell), and drug-sensitivity prediction (pRRophetic/oncoPredict)-was performed to delineate subtype-specific biological properties. A nine-gene CCG-based RiskScore model was constructed using LASSO Cox regression to internally validate subtype robustness and intra-subtype risk stratification. Results: Using consensus clustering of 31 core CCGs in TCGA-LIHC and three independent validation cohorts (CHCC, LIRI, LICA), we identified three reproducible subtypes-Cluster-1 (metabolic-quiescent), Cluster-2 (transition-intermediate), and Cluster-3 (proliferation-inflammatory)-which were recapitulated across cohorts and showed distinct overall survival (Cluster-3 worst; log-rank p values significant across datasets). Multi-omic characterization revealed that Cluster-3 exhibits the highest tumor mutational burden and CNV burden with enrichment of TP53/AXIN1/TERT alterations, strong activation of cell-cycle, E2F, and G2M programs, and an immune-hot yet immunosuppressed microenvironment enriched for TAMs, Tregs and MDSCs. By contrast, Cluster-1 shows relative genomic stability, dominant hepatic metabolic signatures (fatty-acid oxidation, bile-acid and xenobiotic metabolism) and an immune-cold phenotype. Single-cell mapping linked ALAS1 expression to malignant hepatocytes predominating in Cluster-1, whereas NONO and CSNK1D localized to stromal (CAFs/TECs) and both malignant/immune compartments respectively in Cluster-3, providing a cellular mechanism for subtype-specific metabolism, angiogenesis and immune modulation. Finally, a nine-gene CCG-based RiskScore validated prognostic stratification and drug-sensitivity predictions indicated subtype-specific therapeutic vulnerabilities (notably increased predicted TKI sensitivity in Cluster-3). Conclusion: In conclusion, this study proposes a robust circadian rhythm-based molecular classification of hepatocellular carcinoma, revealing three biologically and clinically distinct subtypes characterized by divergent genomic alterations, metabolic programs, immune microenvironment states, and prognostic patterns. By integrating bulk and single-cell transcriptomic data, we identify subtype-specific roles of key circadian regulators-including ALAS1, NONO, and CSNK1D-in shaping tumor metabolism, proliferation, stromal remodeling, and immune suppression. These findings highlight circadian dysregulation as a potential upstream factor associated with HCC heterogeneity and provide a conceptual framework for developing subtype-tailored mechanistic studies and circadian-informed therapeutic strategies.

PMID:41898292 | PMC:PMC13024568 | DOI:10.3390/biomedicines14030645

Think Before You Drive: World Model-Inspired Multimodal Grounding for Autonomous Vehicles

arXiv:2512.03454v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interpreting natural-language commands to localize target objects is critical for autonomous driving (AD). Existing visual grounding (VG) methods for autonomous vehicles (AVs) typically struggle with ambiguous, context-dependent instructions, as they lack reasoning over 3D spatial relations and anticipated scene evolution. Grounded in the principles of world models, we propose ThinkDeeper, a framework that reasons about future spatial states before making grounding decisions. At its core is a Spatial-Aware World Model (SA-WM) that learns to reason ahead by distilling the current scene into a command-aware latent state and rolling out a sequence of future latent states, providing forward-looking cues for disambiguation. Complementing this, a hypergraph-guided decoder then hierarchically fuses these states with the multimodal input, capturing higher-order spatial dependencies for robust localization. In addition, we present DrivePilot, a multi-source VG dataset in AD, featuring semantic annotations generated by a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-prompted LLM pipeline. Extensive evaluations on six benchmarks, ThinkDeeper ranks #1 on the Talk2Car leaderboard and surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on DrivePilot, MoCAD, and RefCOCO/+/g benchmarks. Notably, it shows strong robustness and efficiency in challenging scenes (long-text, multi-agent, ambiguity) and retains superior performance even when trained on 50% of the data.

SynPlanResearch-R1: Encouraging Tool Exploration for Deep Research with Synthetic Plans

arXiv:2603.07853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Research Agents enable models to gather information from the web using tools to answer user queries, requiring them to dynamically interleave internal reasoning with tool use. While such capabilities can in principle be learned via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), we observe that agents often exhibit poor exploration behaviors, including premature termination and biased tool usage. As a result, RLVR alone yields limited improvements. We propose SynPlanResearch-R1, a framework that synthesizes tool-use trajectories that encourage deeper exploration to shape exploration during cold-start supervised fine-tuning, providing a strong initialization for subsequent RL. Across seven multi-hop and open-web benchmarks, \framework improves performance by up to 6.0% on Qwen3-8B and 5.8% on Qwen3-4B backbones respectively compared to SOTA baselines. Further analyses of tool-use patterns and training dynamics compared to baselines shed light on the factors underlying these gains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HansiZeng/syn-plan-research.

CCR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Complex Constraints, Control Flows, and Real-World Cases

arXiv:2603.07886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enhancing the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex instructions is critical for their deployment in real-world applications. However, existing evaluation methods often oversimplify instruction complexity as a mere additive combination of atomic constraints, failing to adequately capture the high-dimensional complexity arising from the intricate interplay of content and format, logical workflow control, and real-world applications. This leads to a significant gap between current evaluation practices and practical demands. To bridge this gap, we introduce CCR-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to assess LLMs' adherence to complex instructions. CCR-Bench is characterized by: (1) deep entanglement of content and formatting requirements in task specifications; (2) instructions that involve intricate task decomposition, conditional reasoning, and procedural planning; and (3) evaluation samples derived entirely from real-world industrial scenarios. Extensive experiments on CCR-Bench demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models exhibit substantial performance deficiencies, clearly quantifying the gap between current LLM capabilities and the demands of realworld instruction understanding. We believe that CCR-Bench offers a more rigorous and realistic evaluation framework, advancing the development of LLMs toward the next generation of models capable of understanding and executing complex tasks in industrial applications.

Adaptation of Agentic AI: A Survey of Post-Training, Memory, and Skills

arXiv:2512.16301v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are moving beyond prompting alone. ChatGPT marked the rise of general-purpose LLM assistants, DeepSeek showed that on-policy reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can improve reasoning and tool use, and OpenClaw highlights a newer direction in which agents accumulate persistent memory and reusable skills. Yet the research landscape remains fragmented across post-training, retrieval, memory, and skill systems. This survey studies these developments under a single notion of \emph{adaptation}: improving an agent, its tools, or their interaction after pretraining. We organize the field with a four-paradigm framework spanning agent adaptation and tool adaptation. On the agent side, A1 (tool-execution-signaled) and A2 (agent-output-signaled) improve the agent itself through supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. On the tool side, T1 (agent-agnostic) provides reusable pre-trained modules any agent can call, while T2 (agent-supervised) uses the agent's outputs to train memory systems, skill libraries, or lightweight subagents. Using this framework, we review post-training methods, adaptive memory architectures, and agent skills; compare their trade-offs in cost, flexibility, and generalization; and summarize evaluation practices across deep research, software development, computer use, and drug discovery. We conclude by outlining open problems in agent-tool co-adaptation, continual learning, safety, and efficient deployment.

Role-Aware Conditional Inference for Spatiotemporal Ecosystem Carbon Flux Prediction

arXiv:2603.03531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate prediction of terrestrial ecosystem carbon fluxes (e.g., CO$_2$, GPP, and CH$_4$) is essential for understanding the global carbon cycle and managing its impacts. However, prediction remains challenging due to strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity: ecosystem flux responses are constrained by slowly varying regime conditions, while short-term fluctuations are driven by high-frequency dynamic forcings. Most existing learning-based approaches treat environmental covariates as a homogeneous input space, implicitly assuming a global response function, which leads to brittle generalization across heterogeneous ecosystems. In this work, we propose Role-Aware Conditional Inference (RACI), a process-informed learning framework that formulates ecosystem flux prediction as a conditional inference problem. RACI employs hierarchical temporal encoding to disentangle slow regime conditioners from fast dynamic drivers, and incorporates role-aware spatial retrieval that supplies functionally similar and geographically local context for each role. By explicitly modeling these distinct functional roles, RACI enables a model to adapt its predictions across diverse environmental regimes without training separate local models or relying on fixed spatial structures. We evaluate RACI across multiple ecosystem types (wetlands and agricultural systems), carbon fluxes (CO$_2$, GPP, CH$_4$), and data sources, including both process-based simulations and observational measurements. Across all settings, RACI consistently outperforms competitive spatiotemporal baselines, demonstrating improved accuracy and spatial generalization under pronounced environmental heterogeneity.

Dual-Modality Multi-Stage Adversarial Safety Training: Robustifying Multimodal Web Agents Against Cross-Modal Attacks

arXiv:2603.04364v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal web agents that process both screenshots and accessibility trees are increasingly deployed to interact with web interfaces, yet their dual-stream architecture opens an underexplored attack surface: an adversary who injects content into the webpage DOM simultaneously corrupts both observation channels with a consistent deceptive narrative. Our vulnerability analysis on MiniWob++ reveals that attacks including a visual component far outperform text-only injections, exposing critical gaps in text-centric VLM safety training. Motivated by this finding, we propose Dual-Modality Multi-Stage Adversarial Safety Training (DMAST), a framework that formalizes the agent-attacker interaction as a two-player zero-sum Markov game and co-trains both players through a three-stage pipeline: (1) imitation learning from a strong teacher model, (2) oracle-guided supervised fine-tuning that uses a novel zero-acknowledgment strategy to instill task-focused reasoning under adversarial noise, and (3) adversarial reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) self-play. On out-of-distribution tasks, DMAST substantially mitigates adversarial risks while simultaneously doubling task completion efficiency. Our approach significantly outperforms established training-based and prompt-based defenses, demonstrating genuine co-evolutionary progress and robust generalization to complex, unseen environments.

DUET-VLM: Dual stage Unified Efficient Token reduction for VLM Training and Inference

arXiv:2602.18846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable multimodal understanding and reasoning capabilities, yet remain computationally expensive due to dense visual tokenization. Existing efficiency approaches either merge redundant visual tokens or drop them progressively in language backbone, often trading accuracy for speed. In this work, we propose DUET-VLM, a versatile plug-and-play dual compression framework that consists of (a) vision-only redundancy aware compression of vision encoder's output into information-preserving tokens, followed by (b) layer-wise, salient text-guided dropping of visual tokens within the language backbone to progressively prune less informative tokens. This coordinated token management enables aggressive compression while retaining critical semantics. On LLaVA-1.5-7B, our approach maintains over 99% of baseline accuracy with 67% fewer tokens, and still retains >97% even at 89% reduction. With this dual-stage compression during training, it achieves 99.7% accuracy at 67% and 97.6% at 89%, surpassing prior SoTA visual token reduction methods across multiple benchmarks. When integrated into Video-LLaVA-7B, it even surpasses the baseline -- achieving >100% accuracy with a substantial 53.1% token reduction and retaining 97.6% accuracy under an extreme 93.4% setting. These results highlight end-to-end training with DUET-VLM, enabling robust adaptation to reduced visual (image/video) input without sacrificing accuracy, producing compact yet semantically rich representations within the same computational budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/AMD-AGI/DUET-VLM.

ALOE: Action-Level Off-Policy Evaluation for Vision-Language-Action Model Post-Training

arXiv:2602.12691v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study how to improve large foundation vision-language-action (VLA) systems through online reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world settings. Central to this process is the value function, which provides learning signals to guide VLA learning from experience. In practice, the value function is estimated from trajectory fragments collected from different data sources, including historical policies and intermittent human interventions. Estimating the value function of current behavior quality from the mixture data is inherently an off-policy evaluation problem. However, prior work often adopts conservative on-policy estimation for stability, which avoids direct evaluation of the current high-capacity policy and limits learning effectiveness. In this paper, we propose ALOE, an action-level off-policy evaluation framework for VLA post-training. ALOE applies chunking-based temporal-difference bootstrapping to evaluate individual action sequences instead of predicting final task outcomes. This design improves effective credit assignment to critical action chunks under sparse rewards and supports stable policy improvement. We evaluate our method on three real-world manipulation tasks, including smartphone packing as a high-precision task, laundry folding as a long-horizon deformable-object task, and bimanual pick-and-place involving multi-object perception. Across all tasks, ALOE improves learning efficiency without compromising execution speed, showing that off-policy RL can be reintroduced in a reliable manner for real-world VLA post-training. Videos and additional materials are available at our project website.
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