Visual Document Retrieval (VDR), which aims to retrieve relevant pages within vast corpora of visually-rich documents, is of significance in current multimodal retrieval applications. The state-of-the-art multi-vector paradigm excels in performance but suffers from prohibitive overhead, a problem that current efficiency methods like pruning and merging address imperfectly, creating a difficult trade-off between compression rate and feature fidelity. To overcome this dilemma, we introduce **Prune-then-Merge**, a novel two-stage framework that synergizes these complementary approaches. Our method first employs an adaptive pruning stage to filter out low-information patches, creating a refined, high-signal set of embeddings. Subsequently, a hierarchical merging stage compresses this pre-filtered set, effectively summarizing semantic content without the noise-induced feature dilution seen in single-stage methods. **Extensive experiments on 29 VDR datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing methods, significantly extending the near-lossless compression range and providing robust performance at high compression ratios.**

While Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, a significant gap persists in their ability to leverage such internal knowledge for high-quality generation. We formalize this discrepancy as Conduction Aphasia, a phenomenon where models accurately interpret multimodal inputs but struggle to translate that understanding into faithful and controllable synthesis. To address this, we propose UniCorn, a simple yet elegant self-improvement framework that eliminates the need for external data or teacher supervision. By partitioning a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge, UniCorn generates high-quality interactions via self-play and employs cognitive pattern reconstruction to distill latent understanding into explicit generative signals. To validate the restoration of multimodal coherence, we introduce UniCycle, a cycle-consistency benchmark based on a Text to Image to Text reconstruction loop. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniCorn achieves comprehensive and substantial improvements over the base model across six general image generation benchmarks. Notably, it achieves SOTA performance on TIIF(73.8), DPG(86.8), CompBench(88.5), and UniCycle while further delivering substantial gains of +5.0 on WISE and +6.5 on OneIG. These results highlight that our method significantly enhances T2I generation while maintaining robust comprehension, demonstrating the scalability of fully self-supervised refinement for unified multimodal intelligence.

The rapid increase in the parameter counts of Large Language Models (LLMs), which often reach into the billions or even trillions, presents significant challenges for their practical deployment, particularly in resource-constrained environments. To address this issue, we propose PIP (Perturbation-based Iterative Pruning), a novel double-view structured pruning method to optimize LLMs, which combines information from two different views: the unperturbed view and the perturbed view. With the calculation of gradient differences, PIP iteratively prunes those that struggle to distinguish between these two views. Our experiments show that PIP reduces the parameter count by approximately 20% while retaining over 85% of the original model’s accuracy across varied benchmarks. In some cases, the performance of the pruned model is within 5% of the unpruned version, demonstrating PIP’s ability to preserve key aspects of model effectiveness. Moreover, PIP consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) structured pruning methods, establishing it as a leading technique for optimizing LLMs in constrained environments.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in code-generation tasks. However, under enterprise scenarios where private APIs are pre-built, general LLMs often fail to meet expectations. Existing approaches are confronted with drawbacks of high resource consumption and inadequate handling of multi-API tasks. To address these challenges, we propose EpiGEN, an Efficient multi-Api code GENeration framework under enterprise scenario. It consists of three core modules: Task Decomposition Module (TDM), API Retrieval Module (ARM), and Code Generation Module (CGM), in which Langchain played an important role. Through a series of experiments, EpiGEN shows good acceptability and readability, compared to fully fine-tuned LLM with a larger number of parameters. Particularly, in medium and hard level tasks, the performance of EpiGEN on a single-GPU machine even surpasses that of a fully fine-tuned LLM that requires multi-GPU configuration. Generally, EpiGEN is model-size agnostic, facilitating a balance between the performance of code generation and computational requirements.

Neural topic models have been widely used to extract common topics across documents. Recently, contrastive learning has been applied to variational autoencoder-based neural topic models, achieving promising results. However, due to the limitation of the unidirectional structure of the variational autoencoder, the encoder is enhanced with the contrastive loss instead of the decoder, leading to a gap between model training and evaluation. To address the limitation, we propose a novel neural topic modeling framework based on cycle adversarial training and contrastive learning to apply contrastive learning on the generator directly. Specifically, a self-supervised contrastive loss is proposed to make the generator capture similar topic information, which leads to better topic-word distributions. Meanwhile, a discriminative contrastive loss is proposed to cooperate with the self-supervised contrastive loss to balance the generation and discrimination. Moreover, based on the reconstruction ability of the cycle generative adversarial network, a novel data augmentation strategy is designed and applied to the topic distribution directly. Experiments have been conducted on four benchmark datasets and results show that the proposed approach outperforms competitive baselines.

A patient portal allows discharged patients to access their personalized discharge instructions in electronic health records (EHRs). However, many patients have difficulty understanding or memorizing their discharge instructions (Zhao et al., 2017). In this paper, we present PaniniQA, a patient-centric interactive question answering system designed to help patients understand their discharge instructions. PaniniQA first identifies important clinical content from patients’ discharge instructions and then formulates patient-specific educational questions. In addition, PaniniQA is also equipped with answer verification functionality to provide timely feedback to correct patients’ misunderstandings. Our comprehensive automatic & human evaluation results demonstrate our PaniniQA is capable of improving patients’ mastery of their medical instructions through effective interactions.1