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Xiang Long

Publications and source records attributed to Xiang Long.

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NTIRE 2026 The 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) Challenge: AI Flash Portrait (Track 3)

In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the NTIRE 2026 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) challenge, with a specific focus on Track 3: AI Flash Portrait. Despite significant advancements in deep learning for image restoration, existing models still encounter substantial challenges in real-world low-light portrait scenarios. Specifically, they struggle to achieve an optimal balance among noise suppression, detail preservation, and faithful illumination and color reproduction. To bridge this gap, this challenge aims to establish a novel benchmark for real-world low-light portrait restoration. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed algorithms utilizing a hybrid evaluation system that integrates objective quantitative metrics with rigorous subjective assessment protocols. For this competition, we provide a dataset containing 800 groups of real-captured low-light portrait data. Each group consists of a 1K-resolution low-light input image, a 1K ground truth (GT), and a 1K person mask. This challenge has garnered widespread attention from both academia and industry, attracting over 100 participating teams and receiving more than 3,000 valid submissions. This report details the motivation behind the challenge, the dataset construction process, the evaluation metrics, and the various phases of the competition. The released dataset and baseline code for this track are publicly available from the same \href{https://github.com/zsn1434/AI_Flash-BaseLine/tree/main}{GitHub repository}, and the official challenge webpage is hosted on \href{https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12885/}{CodaBench}.

cs.CV

LiveClawBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Complex, Real-World Assistant Tasks

OpenClaw-style personal assistants extend LLM agents from isolated tool use to open-ended, stateful, and personalized software environments. Evaluating these assistants is fundamentally a fidelity problem: benchmarks must be faithful both to the distribution of real assistant tasks and to the execution semantics of the environments in which those tasks unfold. Existing benchmarks often lose fidelity in one dimension or the other. Their task distributions are shaped by what is easy to isolate, mock, and verify, underrepresenting real-world difficulties such as cross-service dependency, contaminated state, implicit intent, and runtime change. Their environments are either live but hard to reproduce, or reproducible but reduced to endpoint-level stubs that remove sessions, artifacts, state transitions, and downstream side effects. We introduce LiveClawBench, a benchmark designed around this dual-fidelity requirement. LiveClawBench combines a Triple-Axis Complexity Framework for difficulty-driven task construction with reproducible full-stack mock applications that preserve stateful execution semantics. With 134 executable cases across 10 domains with 22 mocked services, LiveClawBench supports controlled, extensible, and factor-level diagnostic evaluation of realistic agentic tasks. We release the benchmark resources: (1) Benchmark: https://github.com/Mosi-AI/LiveClawBench; (2) Leaderboard: https://mosi-ai.github.io/LiveClawBench/leaderboard/; (3) Trajectories: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Mosi-AI/LiveClawbench-trajectories

cs.CL

To Mix or To Merge: Toward Multi-Domain Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) plays a key role in stimulating the explicit reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). We can achieve expert-level performance in some specific domains via RLVR, such as coding or math. When a general multi-domain expert-level model is required, we need to carefully consider the collaboration of RLVR across different domains. The current state-of-the-art models mainly employ two different training paradigms for multi-domain RLVR: mixed multi-task RLVR and separate RLVR followed by model merging. However, most of the works did not provide a detailed comparison and analysis about these paradigms. To this end, we choose multiple commonly used high-level tasks (e.g., math, coding, science, instruction following, and agent) as our target domains and design extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments using open-source datasets. We find the RLVR across domains exhibits small mutual interferences, and reasoning-intensive domains have mutually synergistic effects. Furthermore, we analyze the internal mechanisms from the perspectives of information constraints, model prediction behavior and self-verification. Our homepage is at https://github.com/Mosi-AI/M2RL.

cs.AI

Self-Manager: Parallel Agent Loop for Long-form Deep Research

Long-form deep research requires multi-faceted investigations over extended horizons to get a comprehensive report. When handling such complex tasks, existing agents manage context at the subtask level to overcome linear context accumulation and information loss. However, they still adhere to a single context window and sequential execution paradigm, which results in mutual interference and blocking behavior, restricting scalability and adaptability. To address this issue, this paper introduces Self-Manager, a parallel agent loop that enables asynchronous and concurrent execution. The main thread can create multiple subthreads, each with its own isolated context, and manage them iteratively through Thread Control Blocks, allowing for more focused and flexible parallel agent execution. To assess its effectiveness, we benchmark Self-Manager on DeepResearch Bench, where it consistently outperforms existing single-agent loop baselines across all metrics. Furthermore, we conduct extensive analytical experiments to demonstrate the necessity of Self-Manager's design choices, as well as its advantages in contextual capacity, efficiency, and generalization.

cs.CL

An Efficient Rubric-based Generative Verifier for Search-Augmented LLMs

Search augmentation empowers Large Language Models with retrieval capabilities to overcome the limitations imposed by static parameters. Recently, Reinforcement Learning leverages tailored reward signals as a viable technique to enhance LLMs performing tasks involving search. However, existing reward modeling for search-augmented LLMs faces several limitations. Rule-based rewards, such as Exact Match, are verifiable but fragile to variations in expression and cannot be applied to long-form workloads. In contrast, generative rewards improve robustness, but designing verifiable and stable rewards for long-form workloads in dynamic corpora remains challenging and also incurs high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a unified and verifiable paradigm, "nugget-as-rubric", which treats atomic information points as structured evaluation criteria for different search-augmentation workloads. Short-form tasks correspond to a single rubric, whereas long-form tasks expand to multiple rubrics aligned with the question's information needs. To support long-form settings, we design an automatic rubric construction pipeline based on query rewriting, which can automatically retrieve passages relevant to each question and extract rubrics from them, both from static corpora and from dynamic online web content. Furthermore, we introduce \textbf{Search-Gen-V}, a 4B-parameter efficient generative verifier under our proposed verifiable paradigm, which is trained via the idea of distillation and a two-stage strategy. Experimental results show that Search-Gen-V achieves strong verification accuracy across different workloads, making it a scalable, robust, and efficient verifiable reward constructor for search-augmented LLMs.

cs.CL

APRIL: Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning to Tame Long-tail Generation

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone in advancing large-scale pre-trained language models (LLMs). Successive generations, including GPT-o series, DeepSeek-R1, Kimi-K1.5, Grok 4, and GLM-4.5, have relied on large-scale RL training to enhance reasoning and coding capabilities. To meet the community's growing RL needs, numerous RL frameworks have been proposed. However, RL training remains computationally expensive, with rollout generation accounting for more than 90% of total runtime. In addition, its efficiency is often constrained by the long-tail distribution of rollout response lengths, where a few lengthy responses stall entire batches, leaving GPUs idle and underutilized. As model and rollout sizes continue to grow, this bottleneck increasingly limits scalability. To address this challenge, we propose Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning (APRIL), which mitigates long-tail inefficiency. In the rollout phase, APRIL over-provisions rollout requests, terminates once the target number of responses is reached, and recycles incomplete responses for continuation in future steps. This strategy ensures that no rollouts are discarded while substantially reducing GPU idle time. Experiments show that APRIL improves rollout throughput by 22.5% on average (at most 44%) across commonly used RL algorithms (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO), accelerates convergence, and achieves 2.1% on average(at most 8%) higher final accuracy across tasks. Moreover, APRIL is both framework and hardware agnostic, already integrated into the slime RL framework, and deployable on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs alike. Taken together, this work unifies system-level and algorithmic considerations in proposing APRIL, with the aim of advancing RL training efficiency and inspiring further optimizations in RL systems. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/RLsys-Foundation/APRIL

cs.LG

VerilogLAVD: LLM-Aided Rule Generation for Vulnerability Detection in Verilog

Timely detection of hardware vulnerabilities during the early design stage is critical for reducing remediation costs. Existing early detection techniques often require specialized security expertise, limiting their usability. Recent efforts have explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for Verilog vulnerability detection. However, LLMs struggle to capture the structure in Verilog code, resulting in inconsistent detection results. To this end, we propose VerilogLAVD, the first LLM-aided graph traversal rule generation approach for Verilog vulnerability detection. Our approach introduces the Verilog Property Graph (VeriPG), a unified representation of Verilog code. It combines syntactic features extracted from the abstract syntax tree (AST) with semantic information derived from control flow and data dependency graphs. We leverage LLMs to generate VeriPG-based detection rules from Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) descriptions. These rules guide the rule executor that traversal VeriPG for potential vulnerabilities. To evaluate VerilogLAVD, we build a dataset collected from open-source repositories and synthesized data. In our empirical evaluation on 77 Verilog designs encompassing 12 CWE types, VerilogLAVD achieves an F1-score of 0.54. Compared to the LLM-only and LLM with external knowledge baselines, VerilogLAVD improves F1-score by 0.31 and 0.27, respectively.

cs.CR

RAVine: Reality-Aligned Evaluation for Agentic Search

Agentic search, as a more autonomous and adaptive paradigm of retrieval augmentation, is driving the evolution of intelligent search systems. However, existing evaluation frameworks fail to align well with the goals of agentic search. First, the complex queries commonly used in current benchmarks often deviate from realistic user search scenarios. Second, prior approaches tend to introduce noise when extracting ground truth for end-to-end evaluations, leading to distorted assessments at a fine-grained level. Third, most current frameworks focus solely on the quality of final answers, neglecting the evaluation of the iterative process inherent to agentic search. To address these limitations, we propose RAVine -- a Reality-Aligned eValuation framework for agentic LLMs with search. RAVine targets multi-point queries and long-form answers that better reflect user intents, and introduces an attributable ground truth construction strategy to enhance the accuracy of fine-grained evaluation. Moreover, RAVine examines model's interaction with search tools throughout the iterative process, and accounts for factors of efficiency. We benchmark a series of models using RAVine and derive several insights, which we hope will contribute to advancing the development of agentic search systems. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/SwordFaith/RAVine.

cs.CL

MiniCPM4: Ultra-Efficient LLMs on End Devices

This paper introduces MiniCPM4, a highly efficient large language model (LLM) designed explicitly for end-side devices. We achieve this efficiency through systematic innovation in four key dimensions: model architecture, training data, training algorithms, and inference systems. Specifically, in terms of model architecture, we propose InfLLM v2, a trainable sparse attention mechanism that accelerates both prefilling and decoding phases for long-context processing. Regarding training data, we propose UltraClean, an efficient and accurate pre-training data filtering and generation strategy, and UltraChat v2, a comprehensive supervised fine-tuning dataset. These datasets enable satisfactory model performance to be achieved using just 8 trillion training tokens. Regarding training algorithms, we propose ModelTunnel v2 for efficient pre-training strategy search, and improve existing post-training methods by introducing chunk-wise rollout for load-balanced reinforcement learning and data-efficient tenary LLM, BitCPM. Regarding inference systems, we propose CPM.cu that integrates sparse attention, model quantization, and speculative sampling to achieve efficient prefilling and decoding. To meet diverse on-device requirements, MiniCPM4 is available in two versions, with 0.5B and 8B parameters, respectively. Furthermore, we construct a hybrid reasoning model, MiniCPM4.1, which can be used in both deep reasoning mode and non-reasoning mode. Evaluation results demonstrate that MiniCPM4 and MiniCPM4.1 outperform similar-sized open-source models across benchmarks, with the 8B variants showing significant speed improvements on long sequence understanding and generation.

cs.CL

Towards Unsupervised Eye-Region Segmentation for Eye Tracking

Finding the eye and parsing out the parts (e.g. pupil and iris) is a key prerequisite for image-based eye tracking, which has become an indispensable module in today's head-mounted VR/AR devices. However, a typical route for training a segmenter requires tedious handlabeling. In this work, we explore an unsupervised way. First, we utilize priors of human eye and extract signals from the image to establish rough clues indicating the eye-region structure. Upon these sparse and noisy clues, a segmentation network is trained to gradually identify the precise area for each part. To achieve accurate parsing of the eye-region, we first leverage the pretrained foundation model Segment Anything (SAM) in an automatic way to refine the eye indications. Then, the learning process is designed in an end-to-end manner following progressive and prior-aware principle. Experiments show that our unsupervised approach can easily achieve 90% (the pupil and iris) and 85% (the whole eye-region) of the performances under supervised learning.

cs.CV

CondSeg: Ellipse Estimation of Pupil and Iris via Conditioned Segmentation

Parsing of eye components (i.e. pupil, iris and sclera) is fundamental for eye tracking and gaze estimation for AR/VR products. Mainstream approaches tackle this problem as a multi-class segmentation task, providing only visible part of pupil/iris, other methods regress elliptical parameters using human-annotated full pupil/iris parameters. In this paper, we consider two priors: projected full pupil/iris circle can be modelled with ellipses (ellipse prior), and the visibility of pupil/iris is controlled by openness of eye-region (condition prior), and design a novel method CondSeg to estimate elliptical parameters of pupil/iris directly from segmentation labels, without explicitly annotating full ellipses, and use eye-region mask to control the visibility of estimated pupil/iris ellipses. Conditioned segmentation loss is used to optimize the parameters by transforming parameterized ellipses into pixel-wise soft masks in a differentiable way. Our method is tested on public datasets (OpenEDS-2019/-2020) and shows competitive results on segmentation metrics, and provides accurate elliptical parameters for further applications of eye tracking simultaneously.

cs.CV

MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies

The burgeoning interest in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) with up to trillion parameters has been met with concerns regarding resource efficiency and practical expense, particularly given the immense cost of experimentation. This scenario underscores the importance of exploring the potential of Small Language Models (SLMs) as a resource-efficient alternative. In this context, we introduce MiniCPM, specifically the 1.2B and 2.4B non-embedding parameter variants, not only excel in their respective categories but also demonstrate capabilities on par with 7B-13B LLMs. While focusing on SLMs, our approach exhibits scalability in both model and data dimensions for future LLM research. Regarding model scaling, we employ extensive model wind tunnel experiments for stable and optimal scaling. For data scaling, we introduce a Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler (LRS), conducive to continuous training and domain adaptation. We present an in-depth analysis of the intriguing training dynamics that occurred in the WSD LRS. With WSD LRS, we are now able to efficiently study data-model scaling law without extensive retraining experiments on both axes of model and data, from which we derive the much higher compute optimal data-model ratio than Chinchilla Optimal. Additionally, we introduce MiniCPM family, including MiniCPM-DPO, MiniCPM-MoE and MiniCPM-128K, whose excellent performance further cementing MiniCPM's foundation in diverse SLM applications. MiniCPM models are available publicly at https://github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM .

cs.CL

OCEAN: An Openspace Collision-free Trajectory Planner for Autonomous Parking Based on ADMM

In this paper, we propose an Openspace Collision-freE trAjectory plaNner (OCEAN) for autonomous parking. OCEAN is an optimization-based trajectory planner accelerated by Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier (ADMM) with enhanced computational efficiency and robustness, and is suitable for all scenes with few dynamic obstacles. Starting from a hierarchical optimization-based collision avoidance framework, the trajectory planning problem is first warm-started by a collision-free Hybrid A* trajectory, then the collision avoidance trajectory planning problem is reformulated as a smooth and convex dual form, and solved by ADMM in parallel. The optimization variables are carefully split into several groups so that ADMM sub-problems are formulated as Quadratic Programming (QP), Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP),and Second Order Cone Programming (SOCP) problems that can be efficiently and robustly solved. We validate our method both in hundreds of simulation scenarios and hundreds of hours of public parking areas. The results show that the proposed method has better system performance compared with other benchmarks.

cs.RO

MTS-DVGAN: Anomaly Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems using a Dual Variational Generative Adversarial Network

Deep generative models are promising in detecting novel cyber-physical attacks, mitigating the vulnerability of Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) without relying on labeled information. Nonetheless, these generative models face challenges in identifying attack behaviors that closely resemble normal data, or deviate from the normal data distribution but are in close proximity to the manifold of the normal cluster in latent space. To tackle this problem, this article proposes a novel unsupervised dual variational generative adversarial model named MST-DVGAN, to perform anomaly detection in multivariate time series data for CPS security. The central concept is to enhance the model's discriminative capability by widening the distinction between reconstructed abnormal samples and their normal counterparts. Specifically, we propose an augmented module by imposing contrastive constraints on the reconstruction process to obtain a more compact embedding. Then, by exploiting the distribution property and modeling the normal patterns of multivariate time series, a variational autoencoder is introduced to force the generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate diverse samples. Furthermore, two augmented loss functions are designed to extract essential characteristics in a self-supervised manner through mutual guidance between the augmented samples and original samples. Finally, a specific feature center loss is introduced for the generator network to enhance its stability. Empirical experiments are conducted on three public datasets, namely SWAT, WADI and NSL_KDD. Comparing with the state-of-the-art methods, the evaluation results show that the proposed MTS-DVGAN is more stable and can achieve consistent performance improvement.

cs.CR

WebCrack: Dynamic Dictionary Adjustment for Web Weak Password Detection based on Blasting Response Event Discrimination

The feature diversity of different web systems in page elements, submission contents and return information makes it difficult to detect weak password automatically. To solve this problem, multi-factor correlation detection method as integrated in the DBKER algorithm is proposed to achieve automatic detection of web weak passwords and universal passwords. It generates password dictionaries based on PCFG algorithm, proposes to judge blasting result via 4 steps with traditional static keyword features and dynamic page feature information. Then the blasting failure events are discriminated and the usernames are blasted based on response time. Thereafter the weak password dictionary is dynamically adjusted according to the hints provided by the response failure page. Based on the algorithm, this paper implements a detection system named WebCrack. Experimental results of two blasting tests on DedeCMS and Discuz! systems as well as a random backend test show that the proposed method can detect weak passwords and universal passwords of various web systems with an average accuracy rate of about 93.75%, providing security advisories for users' password settings with strong practicability.

cs.CR

IntTower: the Next Generation of Two-Tower Model for Pre-Ranking System

Scoring a large number of candidates precisely in several milliseconds is vital for industrial pre-ranking systems. Existing pre-ranking systems primarily adopt the \textbf{two-tower} model since the ``user-item decoupling architecture'' paradigm is able to balance the \textit{efficiency} and \textit{effectiveness}. However, the cost of high efficiency is the neglect of the potential information interaction between user and item towers, hindering the prediction accuracy critically. In this paper, we show it is possible to design a two-tower model that emphasizes both information interactions and inference efficiency. The proposed model, IntTower (short for \textit{Interaction enhanced Two-Tower}), consists of Light-SE, FE-Block and CIR modules. Specifically, lightweight Light-SE module is used to identify the importance of different features and obtain refined feature representations in each tower. FE-Block module performs fine-grained and early feature interactions to capture the interactive signals between user and item towers explicitly and CIR module leverages a contrastive interaction regularization to further enhance the interactions implicitly. Experimental results on three public datasets show that IntTower outperforms the SOTA pre-ranking models significantly and even achieves comparable performance in comparison with the ranking models. Moreover, we further verify the effectiveness of IntTower on a large-scale advertisement pre-ranking system. The code of IntTower is publicly available\footnote{https://github.com/archersama/IntTower}

cs.IR

U-HRNet: Delving into Improving Semantic Representation of High Resolution Network for Dense Prediction

High resolution and advanced semantic representation are both vital for dense prediction. Empirically, low-resolution feature maps often achieve stronger semantic representation, and high-resolution feature maps generally can better identify local features such as edges, but contains weaker semantic information. Existing state-of-the-art frameworks such as HRNet has kept low-resolution and high-resolution feature maps in parallel, and repeatedly exchange the information across different resolutions. However, we believe that the lowest-resolution feature map often contains the strongest semantic information, and it is necessary to go through more layers to merge with high-resolution feature maps, while for high-resolution feature maps, the computational cost of each convolutional layer is very large, and there is no need to go through so many layers. Therefore, we designed a U-shaped High-Resolution Network (U-HRNet), which adds more stages after the feature map with strongest semantic representation and relaxes the constraint in HRNet that all resolutions need to be calculated parallel for a newly added stage. More calculations are allocated to low-resolution feature maps, which significantly improves the overall semantic representation. U-HRNet is a substitute for the HRNet backbone and can achieve significant improvement on multiple semantic segmentation and depth prediction datasets, under the exactly same training and inference setting, with almost no increasing in the amount of calculation. Code is available at PaddleSeg: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg.

cs.CV

Neural-FacTOR: Neural Representation Learning for Website Fingerprinting Attack over TOR Anonymity

TOR (The Onion Router) network is a widely used open source anonymous communication tool, the abuse of TOR makes it difficult to monitor the proliferation of online crimes such as to access criminal websites. Most existing approches for TOR network de-anonymization heavily rely on manually extracted features resulting in time consuming and poor performance. To tackle the shortcomings, this paper proposes a neural representation learning approach to recognize website fingerprint based on classification algorithm. We constructed a new website fingerprinting attack model based on convolutional neural network (CNN) with dilation and causal convolution, which can improve the perception field of CNN as well as capture the sequential characteristic of input data. Experiments on three mainstream public datasets show that the proposed model is robust and effective for the website fingerprint classification and improves the accuracy by 12.21% compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CR