Video anomaly understanding (VAU) is critical for real-world scenarios. Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) enhance the ability of VAU models to describe and interpret anomalies. However, progress in anomaly localization is still limited by two key issues. First, most existing video anomaly datasets only annotate segments that are clearly inconsistent with the context, often omitting subsequent segments that are semantically part of the same abnormal event. Second, the field lacks systematic evaluation protocols. To bridge these gaps, we introduce VALU, a new benchmark that explicitly defines anomalies across five semantic levels and provides comprehensive temporal boundaries and detailed textual descriptions for each. Based on these annotations, we design three evaluation tasks that comprehensively assess models’ capabilities across different dimensions, including temporal grounding, anomaly localization, and anomaly detail discrimination. Evaluation results reveal persistent challenges in current models’ capabilities on VAU. We further analyze and discuss these findings, and hope that both VALU and insights will advance research in VAU and the development of Video-LLMs. Our benchmark will be publicly available.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved code-generation capabilities, particularly through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for private libraries. While RAG leverages API documentation to address the scarcity of private code corpora, its performance critically depends on the quality of retrieved examples. Existing approaches often overlook the intrinsic characteristics of these examples, particularly how factors such as complexity, readability, and correctness impact their effectiveness. In this study, we systematically investigate these three critical aspects—complexity, readability, and correctness—and find that optimal examples should exhibit moderate complexity, semantic correctness, and step-by-step execution patterns. Based on these findings, we propose ComboPrompt, a novel example enhancement method that strategically combines existing API examples to improve complexity, refines code structure for readability, and incorporates automated validation ensuring correctness. Extensive evaluations across five private library benchmarks and different LLMs demonstrate that ComboPrompt achieves up to 22% accuracy improvement over baseline approaches. Code is available at [Anonymous Github](https://github.com/FireAndWin/ComboPrompt_ExampleQualityMatters).

Prompts, especially high-quality ones, play an invaluable role in assisting large language models (LLMs) to accomplish various natural language processing tasks. However, carefully crafted prompts can also manipulate model behavior. Therefore, the security risks that “prompts themselves face” and those “arising from harmful prompts” cannot be overlooked and we define the Prompt Threat (PT) issues. In this paper, we review the latest attack methods related to prompt threats, focusing on prompt leakage attacks and prompt jailbreak attacks. Additionally, we summarize the experimental setups of these methods and explore the relationship between prompt threats and prompt injection attacks.

Existing research in multi-hop questions has identified two reasoning modes: latent reasoning and factual shortcuts, but has not deeply investigated how these modes differ during inference. This impacts both model generalization ability and downstream reasoning tasks. In this work, we systematically examine these distinctions and propose a simple and efficient classification metric, Attribute Rate Ratio (ARR). First, we construct specialized datasets corresponding to the two reasoning modes based on our proposed criteria. Then, using reverse engineering methods, including attention knockout and logit lens techniques, we reveal that subject representations differ significantly across modes: latent reasoning encodes bridge-related information for final answer extraction, while factual shortcuts bypass intermediate reasoning and resemble single-hop factual queries. Finally, our proposed ARR achieves around 90% accuracy on our datasets and demonstrates effectiveness in RAG conflict scenarios, showing that model behavior under conflicting prompts is closely tied to its underlying reasoning mode. Our findings and proposed metric have significant potential for advancing LLM development and applications.

Sparse attention can effectively alleviate the significant demands on memory when large language models (LLMs) process long contexts. Existing methods typically apply the same sparse pattern across different attention heads and inputs. However, this uniform approach fails to capture the inherent diversity of attention patterns within LLMs — the intrinsic attention clustering. To address this, we propose ClusterAttn, a training-free sparse attention method that provides an efficient prompt cache compression scheme under intrinsic attention clustering for efficient LLM inference.Our findings show that attention heads consistently focus on specific clusters of the prompt during decoding, a pattern detectable from an observation window at the prompt’s end. ClusterAttn adaptively fits these clusters utilizing a density-based attention clustering algorithm, thus compressing the KV cache of the prompt. Evaluations on different models across various benchmarks demonstrate ClusterAttn’s superior compression rates and efficiency. By utilizing only 1024 tokens, it can reduce memory usage by 10%–65%, resulting in a latency reduction of 12%–23% and a throughput increase of 2.6–4.8 times, all with nearly no accuracy loss. Additionally, ClusterAttn can handle up to 128k context on a single A100-80GB GPU, outperforming existing methods.