Decoupling

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies commonly run Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbones with billions of parameters at every policy inference, which costs latency and energy. We revisit a decoupled alternative for multi-task manipulation: separate vision and language encoders whose representations condition a compact action head. We run a standardized comparison that varies the vision encoder, the language encoder, and the action head while holding the demonstrations, the training-step budget, the tasks, the evaluation protocol, and the measurement platform fixed, against seven VLA baselines. The resulting Decoupled Embodiment Model (DEM) combines a fine-tuned DINOv3 vision encoder, a frozen NeoBERT language encoder, and a MeanFlow head that generates an action chunk in one forward pass. On 18 RoboCasa tasks evaluated with held-out instruction paraphrases and randomized scenes, DEM reaches 55.6% mean success against 56.9% for GR00T N1.7 and 54.6% for $π_{0.5}$, and on three real-robot tasks it reaches 66.0% against 68.0% for GR00T N1.7. On the same workstation, DEM needs 6.1,ms per policy forward pass, a maximum throughput of 162.7 policy calls per second, and draws an estimated 2.07,J of GPU energy per call, eight to seventeen times the throughput and six to fifteen times less energy than these VLM-backbone policies. Within this trained-task regime, DEM sits on the observed success--latency--energy frontier and provides a strong, efficient baseline for language-conditioned robot skills.

Streaming 3D reconstruction demands both speed and temporal fidelity, goals that existing methods undermine by updating every Gaussian every frame, even in static regions. We present DecoGS, a method for efficient online training of 3D Gaussians from streaming videos. Unlike prior methods that update the entire scene indiscriminately, DecoGS introduces an adaptive mechanism that selectively focuses optimization on spatiotemporal regions exhibiting motion or photometric changes. This targeted training strategy eliminates redundant updates that cause flickering and drift in nominally static regions, while enabling fast, high-fidelity scene updates. The pipeline further integrates region-aware Gaussian management through gradient gating and efficient visibility filtering to maintain temporal coherence and a compact memory footprint. On N3DV and MeetRoom, DecoGS achieves 34.55 and 31.60 dB PSNR respectively, outperforming all streaming and offline baselines, while rendering at 261 FPS with $70\times$ lower temporal flicker than the best prior method, requiring no large-scale pretraining.

A vocoder is a pivotal component of modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Despite the significant progress of neural network-based vocoders, accurate phase reconstruction remains the main challenge limiting both audio quality and modeling efficiency. We introduce PhaseGAN, a lightweight vocoder that addresses this limitation through a "mel $\rightarrow$ Amplitude $\rightarrow$ Phase" reconstruction pipeline. By reconstructing amplitude and phase spectra via distinct methodologies, the proposed PhaseGAN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while utilizing fewer model parameters and reduced computational requirements. The compact version generates high-fidelity audio with approximately 500K parameters and 1 GMAC computational load, making it highly suitable for real-time applications on edge devices. In addition, our approach exhibits exceptional musical audio synthesis capabilities despite no training on musical data, illustrating unprecedented cross-domain generalization. See https://github.com/phasegan/phasegan-audio-demo for demos of our work.

The Neural Finite State Machine (NFSM) framework offers a pragmatic path to full-duplex dialogue by serializing turn-taking control and response generation onto a single causal tape under the standard next-token prediction objective, thereby preserving semantic prowess at a low fine-tuning cost. However, its reliance on synthetic text data fundamentally limits turn-taking naturalness, as Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot faithfully simulate the fine-grained acoustic temporal dynamics of real human dialogues. In this work, we propose a decoupled data approach that learns turn-taking from real Human-Human (HH) spoken dialogues while shaping semantic behavior through configurable Human-Agent (HA) text dialogues. To operationalize this approach, we introduce a rule-based event-guided data transformation method that serializes HH spoken dialogues into FSM tapes by classifying turn-taking events and applying deterministic mapping rules, enabling scalable supervision without LLM-generated annotations. We further propose a Source-Aware Calibrated (SAC) Loss that jointly calibrates the long-tailed distribution of state transition tokens and channels each data source toward the capability it best supervises. Experiments show that our approach substantially improves turn-taking proficiency while recovering the foundation LLM's semantic capability. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Liyht/def-fsm.

Higher-order interaction components are important for signal, image, and video modeling, but explicit high-order operators often suffer from rapidly increasing parameter and computational costs. This paper presents kVNN, a learnable kernelized Volterra Neural operator for compact higher-order filtering. The motivation is to use kernelization to improve the efficiency of Volterra-type neural operators while providing a structured interpretation of their higher-order components. The proposed formulation combines the order-wise structure of Volterra filtering with learnable polynomial-kernel atoms, allowing different interaction orders to be represented by separate learnable centers and coefficients. This order-decoupled representation avoids explicit high-order tensor parameterization and can be implemented as a CNN-compatible layer. Experiments on representative vision tasks show that kVNN achieves a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off.

Building language technologies and conducting NLP research for low-resource languages---particularly when led by native speakers or involving participatory research practices---are often framed as means of addressing inequality, serving local communities, and, at times, contributing to decolonisation. In this paper, we examine recently published NLP and ML papers, focusing on the narratives used to characterise multilinguality, low-resource languages, and underrepresented cultures. We propose a framework for analysing research framings and identify recurring rhetorical patterns that may hinder accountability and constrain equitable knowledge production for---and by---underserved communities. We further assess the evidential basis of assertions regarding community benefit and find that such statements are often weakly supported or left unsubstantiated. Although community ownership and participation are frequently presented as key objectives, our analysis, supported by statistics from the ACL Anthology, suggests that research outputs more often prioritise resource creation and benchmarking---important but distinct goals---over evidence of broader structural change. We conclude by offering practical recommendations to help authors, reviewers, and readers critically assess these assertions and avoid potentially misleading framings.

This paper considers the overestimation bias problem of Q-learning in the setting of a large action space, for the purpose of relieving the bottleneck of existing methods. We find that the large action space increases the randomness in Q-value estimation. The randomness makes two paradigms that drive the major literature on the overestimation problem have their own bottlenecks: the coupling paradigm, i.e., the optimal action and its Q-value are estimated with the same Q-function, always has a positive bias. This is because randomness leads to some actions having abnormally high estimated values than their true values, and the coupling methods prefer these actions. The decoupling paradigm, i.e., the optimal action and its Q-value are estimated with two independent Q-functions, always has a negative bias. This is because randomness increases the estimation gap between the two independent Q-tables for the same action. This paper shows that action intersection can be a simple yet powerful strategy to relieve these bottlenecks. The action intersection strategy enables semi-decoupling via two designs: (1) it allows two Q-functions to share a certain fraction of trajectory data; (2) if a data sample is shared, each Q-function is updated using the coupling paradigm; otherwise, using the decoupling paradigm. Two properties make the action intersection strategy powerful: (1) attaining a large bias range, i.e., varying the data sharing fraction, the estimation bias varies from underestimating to overestimating; (2) fine granularity: the action intersection size can be made arbitrarily finer to enable finer control. We consider two experiment settings, i.e., tabular and deep RL, deep RL experiments show that our method outperforms several SOTA baselines drastically; tabular experiments reveal why our method can achieve superior performance.

When a language model answers an interventional question, the computation it must perform depends on the type of evidence the query requires. We report a decoupling in how a transformer organizes causal knowledge: slot-by-type structure induced by type-level supervision organizes routing, yet remains functionally decoupled from answer readout. We establish this with a typed mechanism library -- discrete mechanism slots partitioned by evidence type, auditable at the state level -- on a causal-world benchmark with exact interventional ground truth, under a frozen protocol, at two scales (22.6M and 125M). Four preregistered findings. (i) Origin. Slot-by-type organization is induced by type-level supervision: absent in architecturally identical unsupervised controls, not buyable by content-free gating labels, and statistically attributable to the supervision signal, replicating at 125M under a powered preregistered protocol (all nine cells passed). (ii) Boundary. The induced structure is a typed routing index with a sharp routing/readout boundary: slot codes scaffold routing but do not drive answer readout ($|Δ\hat{y}| \le 3.4\times10^{-6}$, zero collateral, three seeds, stable across a 5.6x scale window) -- we therefore make no behavioral-editability claim. (iii) Cost. The structure is free: LM quality matches a parameter-matched monolith within 0.0082 nats. (iv) Trust. The library state is exactly local under edit and bit-exactly revertible -- 250 single-edit and 1,000 stacked reverts per seed, zero failures. We further find that the unsupervised null itself moves with scale, so comparisons reusing a null calibrated at one scale may be confounded at another. Every claim is tied to a preregistered, machine-checkable criterion archived before the data it governs; the full audit trail, including one criterion we failed and how the frozen protocol handled it, is released as an appendix.

Existing streaming multimodal models process observations incrementally but still follow a turn-based prefill-then-decode pattern, making them non-duplex: new observations cannot naturally enter an active generation stream. Proactive alternatives use micro-turn polling or external response gates, which fragment continuous interaction, decouple response timing from language generation, and complicate KV-cache-friendly serving. We introduce Aero Realtime, a 4B streaming multimodal model with a duplex architecture for realtime generation. Aero Realtime aligns video, audio, and textual output on a shared temporal grid, where each approximately 80-ms audio slot predicts either a lexical token or a silence token. This allows input and output to advance together, enabling one autoregressive objective to learn both when to respond and what to generate. During inference, Aero Realtime appends only the newest multimodal slot, carries forward the previous output state, and reuses the KV cache for efficient incremental execution. We further provide a complete training and serving recipe, including realtime QA construction, slot-aligned supervision, hardware-aware distributed training, and resumable inference. On four NVIDIA A6000 workstation GPUs, Aero Realtime maintains 84-ms median and 173-ms P95 processing lag over 20 minutes of a continuously streamed video, remaining within 200~ms of the source timeline. These results demonstrate the feasibility of fully aligned input-output modeling for duplex, proactive, and hardware-aligned multimodal interaction.

Reinforcement learning post-training unlocks complex reasoning in LLMs. Yet benchmark scores reveal only whether a model improved, not what changed inside it, nor how it splits finite capability across tasks. A representative interpretability line attributes the success of RL fine-tuning to stronger and more diverse circuit activation. We challenge this activation-centered account by separating activation from control: an activated circuit need not control the post-training reward gain. Adapting Metabolic Control Analysis, we define the Post-training Control Coefficient to measure component control over reward gain and arrange these coefficients by task family into a control matrix, paired with an activation-magnitude matrix. We call cross-task control concentration the Shared Control Bottleneck and the difference between activation and control concentration the Activation-Control Gap. This reveals that highly shared activations can coexist with task-specific control, while a small gap indicates that control has collapsed onto a shared direction and lost task specificity. To reduce this collapse, we regularize the post-training loss with the Shared Control Bottleneck and propose Control-Diverse Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (CD-RFT). The exact regularizer gradient requires second-order automatic differentiation incompatible with flash attention, so we derive a first-order proxy with worst-case overhead below eight percent. On Qwen2.5-7B, CD-RFT achieves the largest control decoupling and improves multi-task capability over matched GRPO across mathematics, code, and logic. The no-KL variant leads on pass@1, and the KL-penalized variant leads on large-k pass@k coverage that KL otherwise degrades. Together, these results show that the Shared Control Bottleneck is both a mechanistic diagnostic and a training regularizer, and that control decoupling and capability gains transfer to Llama-3.2-3B.

Industrial anomaly inspection is severely hindered by the scarcity of real anomalous data. Zero-shot industrial anomaly generation addresses this by generating anomalies on specific products without requiring any of their real anomalous images. However, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations, i.e., inaccurate anomaly information acquisition and uncontrolled anomaly-product fusion. To overcome these challenges, we propose DeCo, which decouples the anomaly structure from its source product, and explicitly recouples it with the normal textures of the target product. During anomaly information acquisition, Dual-Routing Flow (DR-Flow) binds the texture-invariant anomaly structure to an abnormal token, while a parallel constraint, Product-Invariant Flow (PI-Flow), prevents the abnormal token from binding the source product. During anomaly-product fusion, we propose a hybrid injection to recouple the acquired anomaly structure with the target product, and Product Compatibility Correction (PCC) to compensate for the incompatibility between the acquired anomaly structure and the product. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeCo establishes a new state-of-the-art. Training downstream detection models on our generated data yields massive pixel AP improvements of 5.1% on MVTec AD and 8.2% on VisA. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/DeCo.

Split Federated Learning (SFL) facilitates privacy-preserving collaborative training with reduced client-side overhead. However, its split architecture introduces unique attack surfaces, rendering it vulnerable to diverse poisoning attacks. Most existing defenses fail to exploit the split paradigm, limiting their ability to detect and contain malicious behaviors at an early stage. To bridge this gap, we propose Target-Oriented Feature Decoupling (TOFD), a unified framework that jointly enables proactive detection and robust optimization against a wide range of poisoning attacks. TOFD operates in three stages: (1) Target Inference, which identifies potential attack targets by refining class-wise safe zones via class-specific Margin Perturbation (MP); (2) Sample Purification, which adaptively filters poisoned smashed data using thresholds calibrated through cross-class min-max normalization of MP; and (3) Decoupling Optimization, which leverages an adversarial guidance model to capture attack-induced patterns and decouple their influence during optimization, thereby suppressing residual adversarial effects. We provide theoretical guarantees for the convergence of TOFD. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that TOFD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art defenses under diverse attack scenarios, achieving superior robustness with low computational overhead suitable for practical deployment.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a robust architecture for grounding large language models (LLMs) in trusted knowledge. However, standard RAG systems exhibit a structural limitation: retrieved documents carry their own communication styles-professional jargon, formal tone, or academic writings-that shape the behavior of a RAG system before any tone instructions are processed, often causing the system to ignore user requests for a specific tone. We term this phenomenon contextual decoupling, in which a system optimises for factual accuracy while remaining decoupled from the social or operational context of the recipient. Building on prior research in public health peer-support communities, we identify three communicative misalignment-linguistic, cognitive, and relational-that can persist even when retrieval is relevant and the generated response is factually accurate. We conceptualise these as failures of communicative transformation, which remain largely invisible to accuracy-centred RAG evaluation metrics. To address this gap, we propose Tone-Aware RAG (TA-RAG), a conceptual architectural framework that positions communicative alignment alongside factual accuracy as a core design objective. TA-RAG operationalises four constraints-stigma-free language, readability alignment, recipient-sensitive adaptation, and empathetic framing-across the retrieval, context construction, generation, and constraint validation phases in the proposed RAG pipeline. We further highlight an evaluation agenda for jointly assessing factual fidelity and communicative alignment, and identify open challenges. We argue that tone awareness should be treated not as an optional refinement, but as a present design imperative for RAG systems operating in socially sensitive and high-stakes contexts.

Abstractive summarization models remain vulnerable to factual inconsistency, redundancy, and weak length control. We propose a modular generation-and-selection framework for sentence-budget-constrained summarization. A pretrained generator produces multiple candidate summaries, which are decomposed into sentence-level candidates. A combinatorial selector then constructs the final summary by balancing relevance, factuality, and redundancy under an explicit budget. The framework supports MMR, ILP, and a DPP-inspired log-determinant objective without retraining the generator. Experiments on CNN/DailyMail, Multi-News, FaithBench, and TofuEval show consistent improvements in factuality and source-grounding metrics, especially for multi-document summarization, at the cost of lower reference-overlap scores. Human evaluation further indicates higher perceived consistency, relevance, clarity, and conciseness, with a small reduction in coherence. These results show that decoupling generation from selection provides a model-agnostic mechanism for improving factual grounding. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/bcfs-D05E/.

We audit five frontier large language models on native Bangla derogatory speech (gali) across six protocols to test a single hypothesis: Comprehension-Containment Decoupling. We propose that contemporary safety alignment is bound to high-resource surface forms rather than harmful meaning, causing a model's capacity to comprehend a low-resource slur and its capacity to contain it to operate independently. Every protocol corroborates this hypothesis against a human-calibrated baseline (kappa = 0.84). At baseline, models exhibit a 7.92 percentage point comprehension deficit in Bangla while maintaining an identical 92.83% token leakage rate across both languages. Severity calibration tracks surface anatomical cues over compositional harm (+4.00 error on mild slang; -2.00 on threats), while apparent containment gains under orthographic perturbation prove to be a tokenizer-driven "containment mirage." Crucially, explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning rescues comprehension (94.72% Pass) while systematically dismantling containment (96.23% Use). Furthermore, expert-persona framing collapses refusal to 6.57%, revealing that keyword-based filters ignore dehumanizing communal slurs entirely. Our findings demonstrate that high-resource benchmarks cannot certify low-resource safety, necessitating meaning-grounded containment.

Training LLM-based multi-agent systems with multi-agent reinforcement learning is rapidly gaining traction, and a parallel line of work argues that such systems should be judged by their behavior, not only their reward. We take up both threads in spatial cooperative games, where small frozen LLMs prompted with low-level actions fail outright, earning zero reward. Guided by the options/semi-MDP framework---and, because option execution is asynchronous across agents, its multi-agent extension in macro-action Dec-POMDPs---we equip each game with a library of symbolic \emph{options}: typed, state-feasible, short-horizon behaviors executed by a symbolic planner. Each library is drafted by a frontier coding model from the game's source code; the feasibility guards that filter each menu are then synthesized mechanically from cheap random-policy burn-in rollouts---a guard is adopted only if it explains repeated execution failures while hiding no logged success---so no guard is authored, selected, or reward-tuned by hand. Each agent's LLM acts as its policy over options, with a private per-agent LoRA adapter trained by a per-agent variant of multi-agent GRPO (PA-MAGRPO); this lifts frozen bases from zero reward to competent play across three games and four small backbones. Behavioral audits then reveal that reward and cooperation decouple: a rising reward curve may simply mean that one agent has learned to run the entire task alone while its partner idles---cooperation emerges only when the task makes it necessary. Reward alone is thus an unreliable readout of cooperation; behavioral evaluation must sit alongside it.

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to deep neural networks, especially when training relies on third-party data, allowing adversaries to inject malicious behaviors through data poisoning. In this work, we reveal that backdoor behaviors tend to be absorbed by a simpler parallel branch when jointly trained with the main network. Motivated by this insight, we propose Trapping and Removing (TR), a simple yet effective training-time defense that introduces a lightweight shortcut branch as a "honeypot" to trap backdoor knowledge. After training, backdoors can be removed by discarding the shortcut, without requiring any additional data. To further enhance backdoor isolation while maintaining benign performance, we design a knowledge decoupling strategy with entropy-based weight assignment, encouraging poisoned samples to flow through the honeypot while guiding the main network to focus on benign learning. In addition, we introduce an automatic shortcut generation strategy to improve generalization across model architectures. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets and five model architectures demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates a wide range of backdoor attacks while preserving performance on benign data. Code: https://github.com/Zixuan-Zhu/TR}{github.com/Zixuan-Zhu/TR.

Identifying the critical state of mature seismic gaps is challenging, especially when anthropogenic stress perturbations, such as reservoir impoundment, superimpose on tectonic loading. Here, utilizing a high-resolution dense array catalog from the Qiaojia-Dongchuan seismic gap (hosting the second-largest hydropower station in the world), we reveal a distinct vertical decoupling mechanism. The shallow activities exhibit high b-values (1.0), indicative of fluid-driven reservoir-triggered seismicity. Conversely, deep seismicity (20 km) outlines a 'locked asperity' characterized by low b-values (less than 0.8) and high Coulomb stress accumulation rate. We further identify a complex dipping structure, suggesting compound fault kinematics. Additionally, the calculated stress accumulation suggests this seismic gap is in a critical state with elevated rupture potential. Our findings indicate that shallow induced seismicity can mask the silent accumulation of deep tectonic strain. This decoupling model provides a new framework for assessing seismic risks in reservoir-fault systems globally.

Camouflage image generation (CIG) focuses on generating visually concealed objects that seamlessly blend into their backgrounds. Existing methods typically follow either background-guided paradigms that adapt object appearance via style transfer, or foreground-guided strategies that outpaint surrounding regions conditioned on object features. However, they still suffer from appearance discrepancy and background artifacts. We attribute these limitations to cross-context representation leakage, where object and background cues are entangled in a coupled conditional space, resulting in ambiguous control and degraded camouflage fidelity. To tackle this, we propose a new context-decoupled generative paradigm, termed CamoDreamer, which aims to isolate contextual conditional guidance and explicitly decouple latent camouflage features into coordinated object and background control streams. First, a Contrast-aware Contextual Bridge is designed to model cross-context discrepancies and construct contrast-aware dual conditional guidance. Second, Context-Decoupled Assimilation Streams are employed to separate generative interactions conditioned on the dual guidance, while facilitating background rendering with target-aware cues in the latent space. Finally, a Frequency-Adaptive Contextual Blend module integrates complementary high-frequency textures and low-frequency structures from decoupled features to improve holistic coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CamoDreamer consistently outperforms existing methods with a substantial margin, while maintaining a relatively lightweight design.

Automatic voxel-level grounding of free-text findings in 3D chest Computed Tomography (CT) is critical for clinical interpretability. However, this task remains highly challenging due to the intricate spatial complexity of large 3D volumes and the heterogeneity of free-text findings. Existing end-to-end approaches often struggle to simultaneously learn the localized feature representations required for accurate 3D segmentation and the complex semantic understanding needed for text alignment, leading to suboptimal grounding performance. To overcome this fundamental limitation, we propose a novel decoupled framework that disentangles the problem into two specialized stages: (1) class-agnostic lesion segmentation and (2) text-volume reasoning. This structural separation allows the model to first extract candidate sub-volumes by localizing potential abnormalities. Subsequently, intensive cross-modal reasoning is performed to align these localized sub-volumes with free-text medical findings. To resolve the spatial ambiguities inherent in local regions, the reasoning module is augmented with explicit anatomical guidance, utilizing relative spatial coordinates and lung lobe priors. Evaluated on the ReXGroundingCT benchmark, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in overall grounding quality on the official leaderboard. These results demonstrate that decoupling detection from reasoning is a highly effective paradigm for handling the complexity of 3D medical visual grounding. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/khuhm/DAGG.

Deep equilibrium models promise input-adaptive implicit computation: harder problems should demand more solver iterations, and the solved equilibrium should encode the result of genuine iterative inference. We report a cautionary study of a port-Hamiltonian DEQ with a learned initialization on two reasoning tasks -- ProofWriter entailment over frozen DeBERTa embeddings and a BFS-verified graph-reachability benchmark -- in which the implicit computation is a silent no-op. Across tasks, seeds, and controlled ablation arms, the solved equilibrium equals the solver's start point to numerical precision, and bypassing the solver entirely changes test accuracy by +0.00 percentage points in 18 of 19 training runs. Controlled interventions falsify the tempting explanation: removing the anchoring term reproduces every result, and retraining with noise-decoupled starts yields a solver that converges to the noisy start while the decoder learns to ignore it. The single escaping run diverges instead ($\|h^{*}-z_0\|=171$), producing a co-adapted noise channel whose removal improves accuracy. Iteration counts are uncorrelated with ground-truth difficulty ($r=0.009$), and the full apparatus never outperforms a two-layer MLP on either task. We trace the mechanism to gradient starvation along two distinct routes, show that the standard zeroing ablation is confounded and gives wildly seed-dependent answers where the correct substitution test gives a stable zero, and distill a four-test diagnostic protocol for auditing claimed implicit computation. All experiments run on a single free Colab GPU; code, raw logs, and analysis scripts are released.

Under the free energy principle, a predictive system does not observe reality directly; it maintains a generative model of the world and experiences that model's best current hypothesis. Can a synthetic environment be made consistent enough that a predictive system's own inference machinery adopts it as this default hypothesis, permanently displacing the environment that first shaped it? We call this state ontological inversion. Because inducing and monitoring such a transition in a nervous system is neither ethical nor technically feasible, we study the underlying computational problem through a controlled proxy: a convolutional variational autoencoder paired with a recurrent latent predictor, whose evidence lower bound objective is mathematically identical, up to sign, to variational free energy itself. The network is trained first on a baseline visual domain, then on a mixed stream in which a swept rehearsal ratio r controls how much baseline content persists during transition to a target domain. Representational capacity, what the latent space can discriminate, is tracked separately from default behavior, what the system generates when left unconstrained. Across a full sweep of 90 runs, the two diverge sharply: representational accuracy stays near ceiling, 0.97 to 0.998, regardless of r, while default behavior spans nearly the system's entire range depending on r alone, a decoupling of learning from acceptance. More strikingly, at intermediate r the system's default output rises toward the target domain, then partially reverts toward the baseline while training continues unchanged, a structural failure we term cognitive relapse. Resistance to reality-adoption is not reducible to learning speed; it is a structural property with its own distinct failure modes, established here as a computational existence proof and nothing further.

Open-source projects depend on a steady inflow of newcomers. A growing concern is that AI coding agents (tools such as Cursor and Claude Code that write code from natural-language instructions) will crowd them out, by absorbing the simple tasks that beginners start with and by making code harder to read. We give this concern a causal answer. Using GitHub code search we identify 1,888 projects that adopted an agent, signaled by their first commit of a configuration file. We apply difference-in-differences against matched non-adopting controls, restricting the main analysis to the 603 adopters with a genuine pre-adoption period. We find no evidence of crowding-out: across estimators newcomer inflow shows no significant decline after adoption (point estimates run from a small increase to, under the most conservative trend specification, a slight and insignificant dip), onboarding and retention are unchanged, and a sparse, correlational beginner-task measure (good-first-issue labels, which we cannot test for parallel trends) shows no decline. The feared mechanism is real but decoupled: adoption raises per-function code complexity (about +11% on a cognitive metric for Python, a quarter of the prior estimate, and +3 to 4% in cyclomatic terms across all languages), yet in fixed-unit subsets where complexity rose (Python on the cognitive metric, and all languages on the cyclomatic metric), newcomer participation does not decline. These results suggest that, in established open-source projects, adopting an AI coding agent makes code modestly more complex but does not crowd out the human newcomers that a project depends on: the feared trade-off between AI assistance and human participation does not materialize.

Despite rapid progress in interactive world models (IWMs), existing benchmarks evaluate action following only at trajectory level and ignore memory and interaction physics. We introduce WorldRoamBench, an open-world benchmark for long-horizon stability across four dimensions, each with tailored innovations: (i) Action: per-frame action metric bypassing cross-model semantic scale disparity and exposing failures hidden by trajectory; (ii) Vision: segment-based drift metric capturing non-monotonic mid-sequence collapse missed by start-vs-end comparisons; (iii) Physics: controllability-gated evaluation over mechanics, optics, and 3D consistency, scoring plausibility under faithful action execution; (iv) Memory: action-decoupled protocol evaluating scene memory via transition-localized 3D point-cloud reconstruction and subject memory via tracking-plus-VLM reasoning. The benchmark comprises 600+ test cases across Nature, Urban, and Indoor scenes in first/third-person views with WASD 10-60s continuous interaction. Evaluating 10+ open/closed-source models reveals none reliably satisfies all dimensions; even the best achieves only moderate scores. Advances on WorldRoamBench are steps toward IWMs that are stable, physically grounded, memory-faithful, and deployable in real-world applications.

Model routing balances solution accuracy and computational cost by selecting among models of varying capabilities. While recent multi-round frameworks interleave reasoning and planning, we identify a structural failure mode termed Trust Region Collapse. We demonstrate that the deep coupling of reasoning and routing, exacerbated by the dominance of strong pre-training priors under sparse supervision, leads to degenerate local optima where capable experts are systematically suppressed. To decouple these processes, we propose $\textbf{EntroRouter}$, a single-round routing framework that treats entropy regulation as a core objective. We first initialize the policy via Soft Supervision, fitting a distribution of suitable models to establish a high-entropy prior for exploration. Subsequently, we stabilize Reinforcement Learning using a Soft Anchor, which utilizes offline capability estimates to orchestrate controlled entropy contraction within a safe trust region. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EntroRouter retains 98.3% of the strongest expert's accuracy while reducing computational costs by 48.25%.

Wearable devices produce large, high dimensional training logs for everyday runners, and interpretation rather than data collection is now the limiting step. This paper evaluates five dimensionality reduction models, three autoencoder variants, PCA, and a Variational Autoencoder, on their ability to compress nine sensor runner profiles into a single scalar performance indicator, the latent score. Because the setting is fully unsupervised, model quality is assessed along two complementary axes: reconstruction error (Mean Squared Error) and latent score interpretability, measured via Spearman and Kendall rank correlations, Mutual Information, and Permutation Importance. These are combined into a composite selection criterion that prevents selecting models on reconstruction accuracy alone. Feature rankings from the four metrics are aggregated via a modified Borda count, and their stability is confirmed by bootstrap validation. A two feature linear baseline is included to anchor the comparison. Deep autoencoder achieved the lowest reconstruction error and the highest composite score. Once the PCA hidden layers were widened, the deeper variants became closely competitive with Deep AE on the composite criterion, indicating that the limiting factor was hidden layer capacity rather than the one dimensional bottleneck. Running pace, aerobic decoupling, and average heart rate emerged as the dominant latent score drivers across all models and resampling runs, consistent with established physiology.

3D Scene Graph Generation (3DSGG) represents 3D scenes as structured object-relation-object graphs, providing a compact relational abstraction for spatial understanding. In embodied intelligence settings, the same 3D scene may be observed by agents from viewpoints that differ by yaw rotations. However, current 3DSGG models often fail to produce relation predictions that follow the expected transformation behavior under such viewpoint shifts. This behavior reveals an empirical mismatch related to predicate-level transformation heterogeneity: directional predicates such as left, front, right, and behind should transform with the observation frame, whereas most contact, support, and semantic predicates such as standing on and attached to should remain stable. To reduce this mismatch, we propose Transformation-Aware Decoupling (TAD), a viewpoint-robust 3DSGG framework that decouples relation reasoning according to predicate transformation behavior and is supported by viewpoint-stable object representations. TAD decomposes relation reasoning into two parts: one learns cues that should stay stable across viewpoints, while the other learns directional cues that should change with the observation frame. The two parts are merged for standard multi-label predicate prediction. Transformation-specific descriptors and group-aware auxiliary supervision encourage the two branches to capture complementary relation cues. Extensive experiments on 3DSSG show that TAD achieves state-of-the-art robustness under yaw viewpoint changes without training-time rotation augmentation, while maintaining competitive performance under the standard benchmark. The project page is available at https://tad-predicate.github.io/.

This study introduces a particle-based computational framework to investigate the scalability of morality and the systemic decoupling of formal law from decentralized social ethics in expanding populations. While micro-societies reinforce ethical conduct through local reciprocity, macroscale systems introduce anonymity that strains cognitive memory limitations. We model individual agents as discrete particles with finite memory capacities ($L$) and dynamically evolving, stochastic choice profiles ($μ$) regulated by non-linear social pressure switches. Monte Carlo ensemble simulations demonstrate a distinct, non-linear phase transition as the population scales ($N \to \infty$). When the population metric outpaces memory capacity ($N \gg L$), the local re-encounter probability drops as $\mathcal{O}(L/N)$. This structural dilution neutralizes decentralized peer-to-peer accountability, causing global behavioral norms to decouple from moral baselines and drift toward a minimalist legal floor. Furthermore, cyclic scale experiments expose a prominent, path-dependent hysteresis loop, mathematically formalizing the non-Markovian inertia and irreversible nature of moral decay in self-organizing social systems.

Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object. Yet every weight matrix carries two distinct quantities -- a \emph{magnitude} and a \emph{direction} -- and all optimizers stepping in the matrix as a whole couple their dynamics: the directional change from an update depends on the current magnitude, while the magnitude drifts as a byproduct of learning the direction, so neither is governed directly by the learning rate. Typical training therefore leans on surrounding recipes such as weight decay and warmup to keep learning stable at scale, though these regulate the coupling only indirectly; other recent methods instead constrain the weight to a fixed-norm sphere, but add no learnable magnitude, leaving scale control to normalization layers alone. We propose \emph{Magnitude--Direction (MD) Decoupling}, an optimizer modification that factorizes each weight into a fixed-norm direction on a hypersphere and learnable per-row and per-column magnitude gains, updated at separate learning rates, all while the model still sees a single fused weight tensor. The method is agnostic to the base optimizer and removes the need for weight decay and warmup. Across both Adam and Muon, MD Decoupling improves on well-tuned baselines, transfers the optimal LR across model width without retuning, and continues to help at scale on large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. Treating magnitude and direction as separately controlled quantities thus yields more predictable training dynamics and a simple, broadly applicable improvement to modern optimizers.

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation (HKD) aims to transfer knowledge across varying architectures (e.g., from Transformer to CNN) but inherently suffers from severe training instability. We reveal that this instability stems from two highly coupled challenges: massive feature norm discrepancies that cause optimization drag, and severe gradient conflicts between the primary and distillation objectives arising from distinct inductive biases. To achieve stable distillation, we propose SPOFA, a framework built upon a novel Feature and Gradient Dual Stabilization mechanism. Specifically, at the feature level, we introduce a LayerNorm-based decoupling projector that explicitly decouples feature magnitude from direction, creating a bounded and stable space for semantic alignment. At the gradient level, we propose a momentum-driven Exponential Moving Average (MEMA) dynamic scaler. By establishing a robust historical baseline of the optimization trajectory, MEMA actively evaluates instantaneous gradient conflicts and adaptively penalizes harmful distillation signals, guaranteeing stable convergence. Importantly, SPOFA achieves this dual stabilization with an extremely lightweight parameter footprint. Extensive experiments on two mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that SPOFA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly outperforming computationally expensive methods while introducing only minimal computational overhead compared to standard baselines.

Controllable video generation demands independent command of the camera and the subject, yet 2D conditioning entangles them: camera- and object-induced optical flow share the same inverse-depth (1/Z) scaling and cannot be separated from image evidence alone. We first prove that this entanglement is representational, not architectural -- the 2D camera/object split is a non-identifiable inverse problem -- and therefore reframe decoupling as a question of operator design. We resolve it at the level of the attention operator. OrthoMotion routes camera motion into a geometric channel, a norm-preserving rotation of the rotary position embedding (RoPE) phase, and subject motion into a semantic channel, a gated value injection in cross-attention. Because these sub-operators are algebraically complementary -- a rotation versus a translation of the affine action on tokens -- a lightweight decoupling regularizer provably drives their response subspaces to orthogonality, so the two controls stop interfering. To our knowledge OrthoMotion is the first method to guarantee disentanglement by construction rather than hope for it to emerge. It attains state-of-the-art camera and subject accuracy at once while minimizing cross-talk, which we quantify with a new Cross-Talk Error (CTE) metric, cutting cross-talk by more than 2.4x with no loss in fidelity and generalizing across backbones.

While federated learning enables collaborative modelling on decentralised data, standard methods merely fit historical observations. This purely observational approach is fundamentally insufficient for interventional inference and policy evaluation, as sequential actions dynamically alter future states. We propose \textbf{Fed-CausalDiff}, a federated causal diffusion framework for do-simulation. The architecture decomposes the evolution of the latent state into a global causal score function and a local confounding score function. This design enables \emph{decoupled synchronisation} (DSS), where clients aggregate only the shared causal mechanism while retaining site-specific confounders locally to handle heterogeneity. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that Fed-CausalDiff achieves better ATE and policy-value estimation accuracy, offering a favorable trade-off between communication cost and inference fidelity.

Production LLM agents increasingly depend on real-time search, yet native search grounding bundles retrieval policy, provider choice, evidence injection, cost, latency, and generation behavior behind a single model-provider boundary. This coupling makes grounding hard to inspect, tune, reuse, or port, and can trigger Search-Induced Verbosity that breaks strict output contracts. We present Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG), a vendor-agnostic boundary that moves grounding outside the reasoning model through an MCP-compatible gateway, exposing provider routing, source-aware context rendering, configured fallback, retrieval-depth control, and exact plus semantic caching as first-class controls. Across five frontier models on SimpleQA, FreshQA, and HotpotQA, native search leads on recency-sensitive FreshQA, but DSG exposes a stronger frontier when control matters: on SimpleQA it nearly matches native accuracy (86.1% vs. 87.7%) at 91% lower search cost, preserves concise answer contracts, and reaches a 99.4% warm-cache hit rate with 68% lower latency. Deployed as a shared production grounding layer for large-scale agentic workloads with interchangeable models, DSG matches or slightly exceeds native-search accuracy on an e-commerce query-understanding (QIU) workload while cutting search cost by over 98%. Real-time grounding is best treated as an optimizable interface boundary, not a fixed model feature.

Existing vision-language model (VLM)-based AI-generated image quality assessment (AIGIQA) methods suffer from a fundamental semantic-distortion dimensional conflict: monolithic representations optimized for semantic discrimination inherently entangle compositional understanding with low-level perceptual sensitivity, rendering them blind to fine-grained quality degradations. We introduce MST-CLIPIQA, a multi-scale two-stream framework that achieves hierarchical vision-language alignment through explicit representational decoupling. Our architecture leverages dual CLIP encoders with complementary patch granularities: coarse-grained streams capture global semantic coherence while fine-grained streams preserve textural signatures and artifact patterns. An information bottleneck-inspired gated fusion mechanism performs adaptive cross-scale distillation, with optional cross-attention enabling prompt-anchored correspondence evaluation when generation prompts are available. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks establish new state-of-the-art results, achieving average improvements of 1.11 percent SRCC on quality and 2.35 percent SRCC on text-image correspondence prediction, while maintaining efficiency with only 0.8M trainable parameters. Our project is available at https://github.com/YMlinfeng/MST-CLIPIQA.

Aerial manipulation systems have long suffered from representation coupling in end-to-end control, as platform-level Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) movement and end-effector-level arm manipulation differ substantially in action scale, dynamics, and control objectives. In this paper, we propose AIR-VLA+, a flow matching action generation architecture specifically designed for aerial manipulation, featuring cascaded dual-action decoders and an asymmetric feature-level Mixture of Experts (MoE). We construct cascaded manipulation and movement decoders, allowing the UAV to unidirectionally observe the manipulator's intent during movement to achieve workflow coordination, while isolating the impact of UAV movement information backpropagation on arm manipulation stability. Addressing the characteristic that UAV movement is highly dependent on high-level semantics and responsible for task state transitions in aerial manipulation, we design an input feature enhancement module for the UAV movement decoder. This module introduces an implicit visual grasp projector to perceive the interaction state between the gripper and the object, and injects compressed global semantic features. Within the UAV movement decoder, we deploy an implicit MoE architecture, enabling different movement experts to spontaneously exhibit capacity inclinations for various task stages during training. Through dense soft blending computation on the feature manifold, the UAV movement is endowed with stronger task-stage adaptability. Experiments on the standardized AIR-VLA benchmark demonstrate that our method comprehensively surpasses all baselines with an overall average score of 48.0. The overall task completion score improves by 80.2% compared to the single-head $π_{0.5}$ policy, effectively mitigating the heterogeneous coordinated control conflicts of composite robots.

Multi-agent debate frameworks have been shown to improve large language model performance in convergent tasks, but they are currently optimized in a way that heavily favors final output accuracy rather than stability of the process. During long-horizon exchanges reactive systems under sustained perturbations often experience logic degradation, argument repetition, and role drift. To structurally prevent the identity loss and maintain the process fidelity, we introduce Knowledge-Grounded Counterfactual Reasoning (KG-CFR), a dual-stage architecture that enforces a strict separation of concerns between a private, retrieval-augmented planning buffer, and a public execution layer. We assess this system in Dynamic Resource Allocation under Uncertainty (DRAU), a dedicated 1v1v1 environment, introducing diversity as distinct from standard debate settings. Over 270 completely factorial crisis simulation trajectories with stochastic environmental shocks, KG-CFR prevents judge-detected critical post-shock degradation (defined as a quality shift, $Δ\le -0.20$) in more than 95% of perturbed runs, increasing the overall argument quality from 0.694 to 0.822. Our primary contribution is the demonstration of architectural decoupling being an important factor of systemic resilience enhancement under sustained pressure without quality loss. Furthermore, we introduce custom vector metrics for discourse divergence and plan-execution alignment that provide strong, directionally consistent evidence of operational stability. Our ablation experiments suggest that the proper doctrinal grounding can be an equally important factor for argument quality, as the prospective planning. KG-CFR, according to our initial metric evaluations, reduces semantic looping, by preserving the agent's consistency with the original plan.

Learning the compositional nature of the physical world requires joint observation of interacting factors. However, because practical data is often decentralized, these factors are fragmented across isolated silos. Existing decentralized generative approaches focus only on modeling the union of siloed data, overlooking novel combinations implied by the collective whole. To bridge this gap, we introduce Decentralized Compositional Flow Matching (DCFM), a framework that enforces structural constraints across the global set of generative factors, without exchanging any raw data. DCFM enables novel combinations to emerge through peer interactions, even when no single data source can independently support the composition. Empirically, DCFM substantially outperforms federated learning and mixture-of-experts baselines across conditional image generation, robotic spatial planning, and medical attribute co-occurrence modeling.

Vision-Language-Action models face significant challenges in real-world deployment due to the entanglement of high-level reasoning with low-level control, and the instability of policy optimization. In this paper, we introduce SyVLA, a robust VLA model trained with diversified experiences. We propose an Intention Decoupling algorithm to isolate control-relevant features from reasoning contexts and a similar-sample guided RL pipeline to stabilize policy updates and mitigate distribution shift. Extensive experiments on real-world robotic tasks and multi-modal benchmarks demonstrate that SyVLA achieves superior task success rates and stronger out-of-distribution generalization compared to existing methods, while effectively preserving core vision-language capabilities. Codes and Datasets is released on \href{https://sy-vla.github.io/}{project page}.

Block-wise semi-autoregressive decoding is the standard inference paradigm for diffusion large language models (DLMs), but it imposes a strict dependency between blocks: the next block cannot begin until the current block is fully decoded or its denoising budget is exhausted. We observe that once a block exposes a reliable delimiter boundary or stable semantic prefix, continuation generation need not wait for every residual token to be resolved. We propose AsyncLane, a training-free decoding scheduler that decouples refinement from advancement. AsyncLane forks a generate lane at observed delimiter boundaries into a refine lane and a continuation generate lane: the prefix remains editable, while the continuation advances before prefix refinement finishes. The resulting lane tree records decoding dependencies and output order, while execution proceeds over the active lane set. To make this asynchronous schedule efficient under bidirectional attention, AsyncLane combines shared-prefix lane batching, lookahead draft reuse, cascading termination, and compact cache refresh with refresh-logit reuse, preventing model-call cost from scaling directly with the number of lanes. AsyncLane is a drop-in replacement for block-wise DLM samplers and requires no retraining. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation show that AsyncLane consistently improves throughput while maintaining competitive quality. Across LLaDA and Dream backbones, AsyncLane achieves the highest TPS in all evaluated benchmark-length settings; relative to the fastest competing baseline, it reaches peak speedups of 2.95x on LLaDA and 3.04x on Dream, with especially large gains under longer generation budgets.

This paper presents our system description for the 2nd Workshop on Multimodal Augmented Generation via MultimodAl Retrieval (MAGMaR). Addressing the critical challenges of cross-lingual long-video comprehension, strict persona adherence, and zero-hallucination temporal grounding, we propose a fully training-free, two-stage cascaded Video RAG pipeline. Our architecture strategically decouples semantic retrieval from cognitive logical reasoning through a modality-aware division of labor. In the first stage, a high-recall semantic pre-fetching module employs dense retrieval using only high-fidelity visual summaries and global text descriptions, explicitly isolating noisy modalities (e.g., OCR and ASR) to maintain a pristine vector space. In the second stage, an Adaptive, Iterative, and Reasoning-based (A.I.R.) filtering agent, powered by a commercial Large Language Model (LLM), performs fine-grained cognitive reranking. The agent re-incorporates full multimodal contexts to enforce strict logical alignment with user personas, effectively pruning semantically similar but logically irrelevant candidates. Finally, a Prompt Sculpting mechanism constrains the generator to synthesize the distilled subset into strictly formatted JSON responses with exact chunk-level citations. Evaluated on the RAG track, our resource-aware approach shows exceptional precision in both information retrieval and persona-conditioned generation.

We describe \emph{Dual-Route Top-K Retrieval with 1v1 VLM Reranking} for the CoVR-R challenge. The method treats composed video retrieval as two coupled problems: finding a sufficiently complete top-k candidate set, and then safely deciding whether any candidate should replace a strong current top-1. We first improve the reasoning/text seed with a VLM slot selector over existing candidates, without introducing DFN visual retrieval. We then add a visual route from contact-sheet embeddings using DFN-H/DFN-L. The routes are merged into a top-10 candidate set, after which a VLM final reranker performs conservative 1v1 comparisons between the current top-1 and each challenger. On the hidden test split, the final system reaches 95.28 R@1, 97.47 R@5, 98.48 R@10, and 99.66 R@50. The main lesson is that CoVR-R benefits more from recall-selection decoupling than from broad text reranking or direct multi-candidate VLM classification.

Dynamic scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis are fundamental to next-generation visual intelligence applications such as virtual reality, robotics, and digital twins. However, high-fidelity reconstruction of complex, time-varying scenes from arbitrary viewpoints remains a significant challenge. Existing dynamic 3DGS methods suffer from computational inefficiency, since they model all Gaussians as dynamic components. While recent decomposition-based approaches address this issue, they still struggle with degraded reconstruction quality and prolonged training time. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel dynamic reconstruction framework built upon an efficient static-dynamic decomposition strategy using a Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting encoder and an optical flow model. By eliminating redundant computations on static regions, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing baselines across rendering quality, training and rendering speed, and storage efficiency. Notably, on the Neural 3D dataset, our framework requires only 10 minutes for training and achieves a rendering speed of over 700 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU at resolution of 1352x1014. Furthermore, our decomposition strategy eliminates the need for COLMAP preprocessing and enables deterministic initialization, thereby enhancing both efficiency and reproducibility.

Continuous control policies trained with off-policy reinforcement learning frequently exhibit high-frequency action jitter, impractical for direct deployment on physical actuators. Post-hoc filtering attenuates jitter but adds phase lag; embedding smoothness penalties in the actor's loss couples them with the RL gradient and conflates reward regression with over-aggressive smoothing. We present ZAPS-DA, which reduces action jitter at deployment with negligible phase lag and no post-processing. ZAPS-DA pairs an unmodified main actor (trained by the base RL loss) with a separate decoupled actor trained via supervised imitation of zero-phase filtered targets stored in the replay buffer. The deployed policy is the decoupled actor: a feed-forward map from observation to smooth action, with no inference-time filter and no action-history input -- causal distillation of a non-causal filter. A magnitude-matched MSE loss gives zero-hyperparameter portability across optimizer classes. Validated with Soft Actor-Critic and a Savitzky-Golay filter in two driving simulators (paired n=150): on MetaDrive (anchor protocol), ZAPS-DA cuts steering jitter 14-21x and throttle jitter 3-5x (all $p<10^{-4}$, Bonferroni) while matching task-completion (p=0.28 success, p=0.31 crash) at 6.3% reward cost; on a custom Webots adaptive cruise control task, the same configuration yields a Pareto improvement -- reward parity (p=0.121), 8-45x steering-jitter reduction, task-failure rate 2.0% to 0.7%. Against CAPS, the standard penalty-based baseline -- at both its auto-entropy and native fixed-entropy operating points, with penalty weight, spatial noise, and entropy coefficient re-tuned per environment -- ZAPS-DA reaches 14.7x steering-jitter reduction versus CAPS's best 3.2x at matched seeds, a ~4.6x gap, with no per-environment tuning of the smoothness signal and post-hoc applicability to trained policies.

Foundation segmentation models such as Segment Anything Model (SAM) are now routinely used in iterative pipelines, where each predicted mask is fed back as the next prompt. This practice turns segmentation into a closed-loop dynamical process, yet the decoder-level behavior of these systems remains largely unexamined. We show that this feedback loop can induce a previously overlooked failure mode, decoder coupling drift, in which the mask decoder's cross-attention progressively loses alignment with the target object, causing errors to accumulate across iterations. We study this phenomenon by instrumenting SAM's mask decoder and deriving ground-truth-free measures of prompt-image coupling, attention stability, and temporal consistency. On volumetric electron microscopy data, these decoder-internal signals reveal that standard iterative prompting systematically degrades attention alignment and temporal coherence relative to oracle-anchored feedback. We then formalize iterative prompting as a discrete-time dynamical system and show how proximal anchoring reduces error amplification in the feedback loop. Building on this analysis, we introduce DeCoDrift, a training-free inference-time stabilization framework that constrains prompt updates and preserves decoder coupling across iterations. Across extensive experiments, DeCoDrift consistently improves attention stability, temporal coherence, and segmentation quality over standard iterative prompting, without retraining or ground-truth supervision. More broadly, our results show that decoder-internal dynamics are not merely diagnostic: they provide actionable signals for stabilizing foundation segmentation models in closed-loop use.

Communication enables coordination in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but many real-world applications, e.g., search-and-rescue with drone swarms, operate under severe bandwidth constraints. Many communication architectures still expose a coupled bottleneck in which a shared latent representation is used for both policy execution and inter-agent communication. Consequently, reducing message size directly limits the policy's latent space, often leading to significant performance degradation. We address this with two contributions. First, we introduce $β$, a normalised per-agent bandwidth budget that unifies sparsity, rounds, and message dimension into a single comparable constraint. Second, we provide SLIM, a minimal architecture that decouples the communication pathway from the policy's latent representation, allowing us to isolate the effect of bandwidth from the effect of policy capacity while benefiting from in-step communication. We evaluate our method on several partially-observable MARL benchmarks, where communication is essential. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits scalability and robustness under limited communication, with only marginal degradation as bandwidth is reduced.

The distributed setting for Saddle Problems (SPs) has recently emerged as a framework for various modern applications in machine learning and multiagent systems. Despite its relevance, the theoretical foundations of this setting have not yet been thoroughly established. In this paper, we advance this research direction by formalizing the distributed setup for SPs and providing rigorous definitions of communication and computational costs. Our main result is a novel decoupled method that achieves optimal communication cost within the zero-respecting framework. Our method is based on a multi-stage reduction to the decoupled minimization of residual norms, which yields strict improvements over the best known communication cost for the class and the long-standing oracle cost of the Extragradient method. Further, we show by a matching lower bound that our method is communication-optimal within the family of gradient-span algorithms. Finally, we study the extension of distributed SP into Variational Inequality Problem (VIP), which generalizes two-player zero-sum games to multiplayer general-sum games. We show that our decoupled method achieves a new state-of-the-art communication complexity for this broader class.

Transformer-based models have advanced feedforward novel view synthesis (NVS). Current architectures such as GS-LRM and LVSM mix semantic information (e.g., RGB) and spatial information (e.g., Plücker rays) into a shared feature space. Since Plücker rays naturally carry lattice-like spatial structure, these designs can make the spatial bias interfere with appearance representation and degrade rendering fidelity. To this end, we propose to decouple the representation of feedforward NVS transformers into separate semantic and spatial tokens. The decoupled design keeps semantic and spatial information explicit in their branches while preserving cross-branch interaction through shared attention routing. Built on this design, we introduce optional categorized supervision and bidirectional modulation: the former provides branch-specific training signals, while the latter improves interaction between the two branches. Notably, the base decoupled design introduces virtually zero additional inference latency due to its architectural design. The proposed designs achieve consistent improvements, demonstrating effectiveness across decoder-only and encoder-decoder feedforward NVS models.

Image super-resolution (SR) aims to reconstruct high-quality, high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs and plays a critical role in various downstream applications. Despite recent advancements, balancing reconstruction fidelity and computational efficiency remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in resource-constrained scenarios. While existing lightweight methods attempt to expand receptive fields, many of them either incur substantial computational overhead, naively scale up kernel sizes, or lack mechanisms for coherent multi-scale integration, limiting their overall effectiveness and scalability. To address these limitations, we propose EchoSR, an efficient context-harnessing framework for lightweight image super-resolution, which unifies multi-scale receptive field modeling and hierarchical context fusion. EchoSR decouples feature learning into disentangled local, multi-scale, and global modeling stages through an efficient context-harnessing strategy, and further promotes seamless cross-scale integration via a cross-scale overlapping fusion mechanism. Extensive experiments have shown that EchoSR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight super-resolution methods across multiple benchmarks, while also achieving a faster speed $(\sim 2\times)$. The source code is available at https://github.com/funnyWang-Echoes/EchoSR.

Online Multiple Testing (OMT), a fundamental pillar of sequential statistical inference, traditionally evaluates the False Discovery Rate (FDR) and statistical power in isolation, obscuring the highly asymmetric costs of false positives and false negatives in modern automated pipelines. To unify this evaluation, we introduce $\textit{Weighted Regret}$. Under this metric, we prove the $\textit{Duality of Regret Conservation}$: purely deterministic procedures ensuring strict FDR control inevitably incur an $Ω(T)$ linear regret penalty, as threshold depletion during signal-sparse cold starts forces massive false negatives. Tailored for exogenous testing streams, we propose Decoupled-OMT (DOMT) as a baseline-agnostic meta-wrapper. By incorporating a history-decoupled, strictly non-negative random perturbation, DOMT rescues purely deterministic baselines from severe threshold depletion. Crucially, it preserves exact asymptotic safety in stationary environments and rigorously bounds finite-sample error inflation during cold-starts. Guaranteeing zero additional false negatives, it yields an order-optimal $Ω(\sqrt{T})$ regret reduction in bursty environments, with a derived ``Cold-Start Tax'' characterizing the exact phase transition of algorithmic superiority. Experiments validate that DOMT consistently curtails empirical weighted regret, achieving an order-optimal sublinear mitigation of threshold depletion to navigate the non-stationary Pareto frontier.

Long video question answering requires locating sparse, time-scattered visual evidence within highly redundant content. Although current MLLMs perform well on short videos, long videos introduce long-horizon search and verification, which often necessitates multi-turn, agentic interaction. We show that existing LVU agents can exhibit "evidence misalignment": they produce correct answers that are not supported by the retrieved or inspected evidence. To characterize this failure, we introduce two diagnostics (temporal groundedness and semantic groundedness) and use them to reveal two pressures that amplify misalignment: prompt pressure from shared-context saturation at inference time and reward pressure from outcome-only optimization during training. These findings point to a structural root cause: the coupled agent paradigm conflates long-horizon planning with answer authority. We therefore propose the decoupled planner-inspector framework, which separates planning from answer authority and gates final answering on pixel-level verification. Across four long-video benchmarks, our framework improves both answer accuracy and evidence alignment, achieving 55.1% on LVBench and 62.0% on LongVideoBench while producing interpretable search trajectories. Moreover, the decoupled architecture scales consistently with increased search budgets and supports plug-and-play upgrades of the MLLM backbone without retraining the planner. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Echochef/VideoSEAL.

Multimodal Graph Neural Networks (MGNNs) have shown strong potential for learning from multimodal attributed graphs, yet most existing approaches rely on tightly coupled architectures that suffer from prohibitive computational overhead. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical analysis showing that decoupled MGNNs are substantially more efficient and scalable for large-scale graph learning. However, we identify a critical bottleneck in existing decoupled pipelines, namely modal conflict, which arises in both the propagation and aggregation stages. Specifically, independent multi-hop diffusion causes cross-modal semantic divergence during propagation, while naive fusion fails to align multi-hop feature trajectories during aggregation, jointly limiting effective representation learning. To address this challenge, we propose CAMPA, a Cross-modal Aligned Multimodal Propagation & Aggregation framework for decoupled multimodal graph learning. Concretely, CAMPA introduces a two-stage alignment mechanism: (1) cross-modal aligned propagation, which injects cross-modal similarity priors into message passing to preserve semantic consistency without additional parameter overhead; (2) trajectory aligned aggregation, which leverages trajectory-level self-attention and cross-attention to capture and align long-range dependencies across modalities and hops. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets and tasks demonstrate that CAMPA consistently outperforms strong coupled and decoupled baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of the decoupled paradigm.

Large language models demonstrate remarkable ability in factual recall, yet the fundamental limits of storing and retrieving input--output associations with neural networks remain unclear. We study these limits in a minimal setting: a linear associative memory that maps $p$ input embeddings in $\mathbb{R}^d$ to their corresponding~$d$-dimensional targets via a single layer, requiring each mapped input to be well separated from all other targets. Unlike in supervised classification, this strict separation induces~$p$ constraints per association and produces strong correlations between constraints that make a direct characterisation of the storage capacity difficult. Here, we provide a precise characterisation of this capacity in the following way. We first introduce a decoupled model in which each input has its own independent set of competing outputs, and provide numerical and analytical evidence that this decoupled model is equivalent to the original model in terms of storage capacity, spectra of the learnt weights, and storage mechanism. Using tools from statistical physics, we show that the decoupled model can store up to $p_c \log p_c / d^2 = 1 / 2$ associations, and generalise the computation of $p_c$ to linear two-layer architectures. Our analysis also gives mechanistic insight into how the optimal solution improves over a naïve Hebbian learning rule: rather than boosting input-output alignments with broad fluctuations, the optimal solution raises the correct scores just above the extreme-value threshold set by the competing outputs. These findings give a sharp statistical-physics characterisation of factual storage in linear networks and provide a baseline for understanding the memory capacity of more realistic neural architectures.

Asynchronous DiLoCo systems may receive pseudo-gradients computed several outer rounds earlier, yet the standard Nesterov outer optimizer does not explicitly condition its update on per-update age. This can make the outer momentum buffer brittle under large controlled delays. We propose Cosine Gated Adam Decay (CGAD), a simple, drop-in, age-aware outer optimizer that scales each incoming pseudo-gradient by $σ(τ) = γ(τ) e^{-ατ}$ before it enters Adam's first- and second-moment buffers; the exponential models information decay and the cosine gate $γ(τ)$ smoothly zeroes contributions past a chosen cutoff. CGAD reduces to plain Adam at $τ=0$, adds two hyperparameters whose defaults transfer across scales, and extends to partial-sync schedulers via a per-fragment age-aware variant (PA-CGAD). For an idealized gated-adaptive update on smooth non convex objectives, we prove a non-asymptotic convergence bound whose staleness-bias term depends on $α$ alone, rather than on the realized maximum delay $τ_{\max}$; standard analyses of asynchronous momentum-SGD instead carry a $τ_{\max}^2$ factor. Empirically, on Llama style language model pretraining at 25M, 1B, and 7B parameters, CGAD trains stably across the controlled delays we sweep. The cosine cutoff acts as scale insurance: the closest baseline, Adam Decay (CGAD without the cutoff), is competitive at 25M but its seed-to-seed $σ$ at $τ=8$ grows 27x from 25M to 7B, pushing its single-shot risk (mean + $σ$) above the chance-level loss while CGAD's stays well below. The published Nesterov recipe is the least stable method on the full sweep.

Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a text modification without human-annotated CIR triplets. Projection-based ZS-CIR methods are attractive because they do not rely on LLMs at inference and remain lightweight, but they often underperform LLM-based approaches on complex semantic modifications. This gap reflects a semantic transition bottleneck in projection-based ZS-CIR: endpoint-level matching can let the edit text act as a target-side attribute cue rather than grounding it as a source-conditioned semantic transition. We further show that adding semantic transition supervision to the same text adapter creates an endpoint--transition conflict between endpoint alignment and semantic transition alignment. To address this conflict, DeCIR decouples endpoint and transition learning. It constructs paired forward/reverse edit tuples from image-caption pairs, trains separate low-rank text adapter branches for endpoint alignment and semantic transition alignment, and merges them with Low-Rank Directional Merge (LRDM) into one deployable adapter. Extensive experiments on CIRR, CIRCO, FashionIQ, and GeneCIS demonstrate that DeCIR consistently improves projection-based ZS-CIR without increasing inference complexity.

Class-incremental learning aims to continuously acquire new knowledge while preserving previously learned information, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods primarily restrict parameter updates but often overlook their structural properties in high-dimensional spaces. From a subspace perspective, updates induced by different tasks tend to lie in multiple overlapping low-rank subspaces, leading to cross-task subspace interference and severe forgetting. To address this issue, we propose HDSD, a Hierarchical Dual-Subspace Decoupling framework for continual learning in vision-language models. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight Feature Modulation Module (FMM) that explicitly decomposes the parameter space into general and task-specific subspaces. Building on this design, we develop two complementary components. First, a General Fusion Module (GFM) evaluates relative parameter changes across tasks and uses an adaptive threshold to capture stable and transferable knowledge. Second, a Hierarchical Learning Module (HLM) performs structured parameter decomposition via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and uses a scaling mechanism to constrain updates within distinct subspace scales. Together, these designs reduce subspace interference and parameter drift. Extensive experiments on conventional benchmarks show that HDSD achieves state-of-the-art results.

Detecting AI-generated images across unseen architectures remains challenging, as existing models often overfit to generator-specific fingerprints and semantic content rather than learning universal forgery traces. We attribute this failure to feature entanglement: detectors learn these factors as a single entangled representation, where universal forgery traces are inextricably confounded with both generator-specific fingerprints and semantic content. Crucially, our spectral analysis reveals that this entanglement is avoidable: distinct generator-specific fingerprints (e.g., GAN stripes vs. Diffusion Model spots) occupy disjoint frequency subspaces and coexist as independent superpositions. Leveraging this physical orthogonality, we propose the Orthogonal Decomposition and Purification Network (ODP-Net) to structurally disentangle these factors. Specifically, ODP-Net employs (1) Instance-aware Orthogonal Decomposition to project features into mutually exclusive subspaces: universal forgery traces, generator-specific fingerprints, and semantic content; (2) Perturbation-based Purification to enforce semantic invariance via cross-sample feature injection; and (3) Manifold Alignment to bridge domain gaps. By explicitly decoupling universal forgery traces from generator-specific fingerprints and semantic content, ODP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on unseen architectures (e.g., Stable Diffusion 3), validating that structural disentanglement is key to generalization.

The rapid emergence of generative image models has led to the development of specialized watermarking techniques, particularly in-generation methods such as seed-based embedding. However, current evaluations in this area remain largely empirical, making them heavily reliant on the specific model architectures used for generation and inversion. This prevents any clear conclusion on the performance of any method, especially regarding security, for which a rigorous definition is lacking. Against this approach, we argue that the effectiveness of a watermarking scheme should be established purely through a thorough theoretical analysis. This is enabled by decoupling the model-dependent part from the actual decision mechanism of the watermarking system. Using this decoupling, we introduce a formal evaluation framework based on security, robustness, and fidelity. This allows precise comparisons between watermarking systems through a characteristic surface representing the trade-off between these three quantities, independent of any generative model. Based on this framework, we propose SSB, a novel watermarking method that generalizes previous seed-based methods by allowing to reach any security-robustness-fidelity regime on its characteristic surface. This work opens the door to the design of modern watermarking systems with theoretical guarantees that do not necessitate any costly empirical evaluations.

Despite the rapid evolution of training paradigms, the decoder backbone of large vision--language models (LVLMs) remains fundamentally rooted in the residual-connection Transformer architecture. Therefore, deciphering the distinct roles of internal modules is critical for understanding model mechanics and guiding architectural optimization. While prior statistical approaches have provided valuable attribution-based insights, they often lack a unified theoretical basis. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified framework grounded in information theory and geometry to quantify the geometric and entropic nature of residual updates. Applying this unified framework reveals a fundamental functional decoupling: Attention acts as a subspace-preserving operator focused on reconfiguration, whereas FFNs serve as subspace-expanding operators driving semantic innovation. Strikingly, further experiments demonstrate that replacing learned attention weights with predefined values (e.g., Gaussian noise) yields comparable or even superior performance across a majority of datasets relative to vanilla models. These results expose severe misallocation and redundancy in current mechanisms, suggesting that state-of-the-art LVLMs effectively ``get lost in attention'' rather than efficiently leveraging visual context.

Explicit reconstruction constraints derived from the decoupled representation are further imposed to suppress abnormal channel amplification and chromatic noise. Experiments on LOLv2-Real, MIT-Adobe FiveK, and LSRW show that the proposed method achieves competitive or superior quantitative and visual performance, reaching 29.71 dB PSNR and 0.89 SSIM on LOLv2-Real. DarkFace experiments further indicate improved downstream face detection under low-light conditions. Code and pretrained models are available at: https://github.com/mubaisam/ICD.

Streaming video understanding requires processing unbounded video streams with limited memory and computation, posing two key challenges. First, continuously constructing new and evicting old key-value(KV) caches is required for unbounded streams. Secondly, due to the high cost of collecting and training on unbounded streams, models must learn from short sequences while generalizing to long streams. Existing streaming VideoVLLMs fail to scale to unbounded video streams or focus on cache reuse strategies, leaving the impact of cache construction underexplored. In this paper, we propose Decoupled Streaming Cache(DSCache), a training-free cache construction mechanism that adapts pretrained offline models to streaming settings. DSCache maintains a cumulative past KV cache while constructing a separate instant cache on-demand, decoupled from past caches to preserve the informativeness of recent inputs. To enable position extrapolation beyond the training length, DSCache further incorporates a position-agnostic encoding strategy, ensuring KV caches to support unseen positions and preventing position overflow. Experiments on Streaming Video QA benchmarks demonstrate DSCache's state-of-the-art performance, with an average 2.5% accuracy gains over prior methods.