Figure 1: The Solve-Detect-Verify (SDV) pipeline transforms linguistic signals into efficiency.Left: On AIME 2024, SDV achieves 83.3% accuracy (vs.63.3% for GenPRM) while using 6x fewer verification tokens by pruning redundant reasoning.Right: The pipeline is powered by FlexiVe , a unified verifier.Unlike process-based verifiers that incur per-step overhead, FlexiVe analyzes traces holistically.It employs a "pragmatic" consensus strategy: parallel "Fast Thinking" checks (∼0.1k tokens) provide an initial semantic intuition, escalating to deliberative "Slow Thinking" (∼4k tokens) only when the model exhibits verbalized uncertainty.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in complex reasoning, often leveraging external verifiers to improve multi-step process reliability.However, existing process verification methods face critical limitations: discriminative Process Reward Models (PRMs) often provide overly simplistic binary feedback and struggle with incomplete reasoning traces, while sophisticated Generative Reward Models (GenRMs) can be computationally expensive.Furthermore, curating quality supervision data for process verifier is of challenging.Therefore, we present Dyve, a dynamic process verifier that enhances reasoning error detection in LLMs by integrating fast (System 1) and slow (System 2) thinking, inspired by Kahneman's Systems Theory.Dyve adaptively applies immediate token-level confirmation for straightforward steps and comprehensive analysis for complex ones.To address data challenges and enable its adaptive fast and slow thinking, Dyve employs a novel step-wise consensus-filtered supervision strategy.This strategy leverages Monte Carlo estimation, LLM-as-a-Judge, and specialized reasoning models to extract the high-quality training signals from noisy rollouts.Experimental results on ProcessBench and the MATH dataset confirm that Dyve significantly outperforms existing process-based verifiers and boosts performance in Best-of-N settings, while maintaining computational efficiency through strategic resource allocation.Our code, data and model are released at: https://github.com/ staymylove/

The emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) presents promising opportunities for automation and enhancement in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). However, comprehensively evaluating these models in circuit design remains challenging due to the narrow scope of existing benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMCircuitEval, the first multimodal benchmark specifically designed to assess MLLM performance comprehensively across diverse EDA tasks. MMCircuitEval comprises 3614 meticulously curated question-answer (QA) pairs spanning digital and analog circuits across critical EDA stages—ranging from general knowledge and specifications to front-end and back-end design. Derived from textbooks, technical question banks, datasheets, and real-world documentation, each QA pair undergoes rigorous expert review for accuracy and relevance. Our benchmark uniquely categorizes questions by design stage, circuit type, tested abilities (knowledge, comprehension, reasoning, computation), and difficulty level, enabling detailed analysis of model capabilities and limitations. Extensive evaluations reveal significant performance gaps among existing LLMs, particularly in back-end design and complex computations, highlighting the critical need for targeted training datasets and modeling approaches. MMCircuitEval provides a foundational resource for advancing MLLMs in EDA, facilitating their integration into real-world circuit design workflows. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/MMCircuitEval.

Large language models (LLMs) often produce reasoning steps that are superficially coherent yet internally inconsistent, leading to unreliable outputs. Since such failures typically arise from implicit or poorly-grounded knowledge, we introduce \emph{Grounded Reasoning in Dependency (GRiD)}, a novel dependency-aware reasoning framework that explicitly grounds reasoning steps in structured knowledge. GRiD represents reasoning as a graph consisting of interconnected knowledge extraction nodes and reasoning nodes, enforcing logical consistency through explicit dependencies. Each reasoning step is validated via a lightweight, step-wise verifier that ensures logical correctness relative to its premises. Extensive experiments across diverse reasoning benchmarks—including StrategyQA, CommonsenseQA, GPQA, and TruthfulQA—demonstrate that GRiD substantially improves reasoning accuracy, consistency, and faithfulness compared to recent state-of-the-art structured reasoning methods. Notably, GRiD enhances performance even when applied purely as a lightweight verification module at inference time, underscoring its generalizability and practical utility. Code is available at: https://github.com/cure-lab/GRiD.

Designing egocentric 3D hand pose estimation systems that can perform reliably in complex, real-world scenarios is crucial for downstream applications. Previous approaches using RGB or NIR imagery struggle in challenging conditions: RGB methods are susceptible to lighting variations and obstructions like handwear, while NIR techniques can be disrupted by sunlight or interference from other NIR-equipped devices. To address these limitations, we present ThermoHands, the first benchmark focused on thermal image-based egocentric 3D hand pose estimation, demonstrating the potential of thermal imaging to achieve robust performance under these conditions. The benchmark includes a multi-view and multi-spectral dataset collected from 28 subjects performing hand-object and hand-virtual interactions under diverse scenarios, accurately annotated with 3D hand poses through an automated process. We introduce a new baseline method, TherFormer, utilizing dual transformer modules for effective egocentric 3D hand pose estimation in thermal imagery. Our experimental results highlight TherFormer's leading performance and affirm thermal imaging's effectiveness in enabling robust 3D hand pose estimation in adverse conditions.

Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) traditionally rely on odometry and building infrastructures like WiFi, often supplemented by building floor plans for increased accuracy. However, the limitation of floor plans in terms of availability and timeliness of updates challenges their wide applicability. In contrast, the proliferation of smartphones and WiFi-enabled robots has made crowdsourced radio maps – databases pairing locations with their corresponding Received Signal Strengths (RSS) – increasingly accessible. These radio maps not only provide WiFi fingerprint-location pairs but encode movement regularities akin to the constraints imposed by floor plans. This work investigates the possibility of leveraging these radio maps as a substitute for floor plans in multimodal IPS. We introduce a new framework to address the challenges of radio map inaccuracies and sparse coverage. Our proposed system integrates an uncertainty-aware neural network model for WiFi localization and a bespoken Bayesian fusion technique for optimal fusion. Extensive evaluations on multiple real-world sites indicate a significant performance enhancement, with results showing ∼ 25% improvement over the best baseline.

3D occupancy-based perception pipeline has significantly advanced autonomous driving by capturing detailed scene descriptions and demonstrating strong generalizability across various object categories and shapes. Current methods predominantly rely on LiDAR or camera inputs for 3D occupancy prediction. These methods are susceptible to adverse weather conditions, limiting the all-weather deployment of self-driving cars. To improve perception robustness, we leverage the recent advances in automotive radars and introduce a novel approach that utilizes 4D imaging radar sensors for 3D occupancy prediction. Our method, RadarOcc, circumvents the limitations of sparse radar point clouds by directly processing the 4D radar tensor, thus preserving essential scene details. RadarOcc innovatively addresses the challenges associated with the voluminous and noisy 4D radar data by employing Doppler bins descriptors, sidelobe-aware spatial sparsification, and range-wise self-attention mechanisms. To minimize the interpolation errors associated with direct coordinate transformations, we also devise a spherical-based feature encoding followed by spherical-to-Cartesian feature aggregation. We benchmark various baseline methods based on distinct modalities on the public K-Radar dataset. The results demonstrate RadarOcc's state-of-the-art performance in radar-based 3D occupancy prediction and promising results even when compared with LiDAR- or camera-based methods. Additionally, we present qualitative evidence of the superior performance of 4D radar in adverse weather conditions and explore the impact of key pipeline components through ablation studies.

Bit-Trojan attacks based on Bit-Flip Attacks (BFAs) have emerged as severe threats to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) deployed in safety-critical systems since they can inject Trojans during the model deployment stage without accessing training supply chains. Existing works are mainly devoted to improving the executability of Bit-Trojan attacks, while seriously ignoring the concerns on evasiveness. In this paper, we propose a highly Evasive Targeted Bit-Trojan (ETBT) with evasiveness improvements from three aspects, i.e., reducing the number of bit-flips (improving executability), smoothing activation distribution, and reducing accuracy fluctuation. Specifically, key neuron extraction is utilized to identify essential neurons from DNNs precisely and decouple the key neurons between different classes, thus improving the evasiveness regarding accuracy fluctuation and executability. Additionally, activation-constrained trigger generation is devised to eliminate the differences between activation distributions of Trojaned and clean models, which enhances evasiveness from the perspective of activation distribution. Ultimately, the strategy of constrained target bits search is designed to reduce bit-flip numbers, directly benefits the evasiveness of ETBT. Benchmark-based experiments are conducted to evaluate the superiority of ETBT. Compared with existing works, ETBT can significantly improve evasiveness-relevant performances with much lower computation overheads, better robustness, and generalizability. Our code is released athttps://github.com/bluefier/ETBT.

Backdoor attack to deep neural networks (DNNs) is among the predominant approaches to bring great threats into artificial intelligence. The existing methods to detect backdoor attacks focus on the perspective of distributions in DNNs, however, limited by its ability of generalization across DNN models. In this article, a critical-path-based backdoor detector (CPBD) is proposed, which approaches to detect backdoor attacks via DNN's interpretability. CPBD is designed to efficiently discover the characteristics of backdoors, which distinguish the critical paths in the attacked DNNs. To deal with the intractably large number of neurons, we propose to simplify the neurons, and the preserved key nodes are integrated into a set of critical paths. Thus, a DNN model can be formulated as a combination of several critical paths. Afterward, the detection of backdoors is performed based on the analysis of critical paths corresponding to different classes. Then, combining all the above steps, the CPBD algorithm is integrated to present the results in a standard and systematic manner. In addition, CPBD is able to locate neurons associated with malicious triggers, the combination of which is named as trigger propagation path. Extensive experiments are conducted, which testify the efficiency of the proposed method on multiple DNNs and different trigger sizes.

Traditional Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) use odometry, WiFi, and often building floor plans for accuracy. However, floor plan limitations have shifted attention to crowd-sourced radio maps, popularized by smartphones and WiFi-integrated robots. These maps pair locations with Received Signal Strengths (RSS) and reflect movement patterns similar to floor plans. Our research explores using radio maps as an alternative to floor plans in IPS. We've developed a new framework that combines an uncertainty-aware neural network for WiFi positioning with a Bayesian fusion method. Testing in real-world scenarios showed about a 25% performance increase compared to the leading baseline.

As an emerging threat to deep neural networks (DNNs), backdoor attacks have received increasing attentions due to the challenges posed by the lack of transparency inherent in DNNs. In this article, we develop an efficient algorithm from the interpretability of DNNs to defend against backdoor attacks to DNN models. To extract critical neurons, we deploy sets of control gates following neurons in layers, and the function of a DNN model can be interpreted as semantic sensitivities of neurons to input samples. A backdoor identification approach, derived from the activation frequency distribution on critical neurons, is proposed to reveal anomalies of particular neurons produced by backdoor attacks. Subsequently, a feasible and fine-grained pruning strategy is introduced to eliminate backdoors hidden in DNN models, without the need of retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can identify and eliminate malicious backdoors efficiently in both single-target and multitarget scenarios with the performance of a DNN model retained to a large extent.

3D deep learning has been applied in safety-critical scenarios, e.g., autonomous driving. Several works have raised the security problems of 3D deep learnings mainly from the perspective of adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel backdoor attack method to threaten 3D deep learning without the original training data. Several neurons are selected and made sensitive to backdoor triggers. The backdoor triggers are generated by reversing neural network, and the shape of which is constrained to map the objects in the physical world. Sufficient training data can be also generated by reverse engineering. Finally, retraining with the generated 3D trigger and training data is applied to inject backdoors, which is in no need of accessing the original training process and data.

Backdoor attacks to deep neural networks (DNNs) have received increasing attentions, particularly in applications from edge computing. The detection of backdoor attacks is a challenging task, due to the lack of transparency in DNN. In this paper, we design a novel method to detect backdoor attacks in deep neural networks, which is derived from the interpretability of a DNN. A comprehensive analysis of the critical path in DNN is conducted, based on which two indicators are proposed, including the correlation coefficient and the discrete degree. Conseqently, an efficient backdoor detection algorithm is proposed, which only needs a few runtime images to identify the backdoor attacks. Initial experiments indicated the efficiency.