Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex information-seeking tasks, yet this power comes at a steep computational cost. Driven by accuracy-focused training paradigms, current models adopt brute-force strategies characterized by blind tool dependency and performative reasoning—generating long, redundant trajectories that are far from necessary for resolving these tasks, leading to wasteful tool calls and excessive token consumption. To overcome this efficiency trap, we propose SlimSearcher, a principled framework that pushes the Pareto frontier between accuracy and computational cost across both Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). In the SFT stage, SlimSearcher employs Pareto-efficient filtration to distill trajectories that are both successful and economical, guiding the model toward inherently efficiency-aware search behaviors. During RL, we introduce Adaptive Reward Gating, a dynamic reward-shaping mechanism that evaluates relative tool and token efficiency within a sampled cohort. By cascading these adaptive efficiency metrics with a strict correctness gate, our approach effectively avoids the brevity bias associated with absolute penalties and mitigates reward hacking. Extensive experiments on long-horizon benchmarks, including GAIA, BrowseComp, and XBench-DeepSearch, demonstrate that SlimSearcher reduces average tool-call rounds by 28%–59% while maintaining or improving accuracy.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) models typically suffer significant performance degradation under domain shifts. While Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) aims to mitigate this, existing discriminative approaches often succumb to “confident but wrong” predictions on out-of-distribution samples. Conversely, generative models offer robust calibration but incur prohibitive computational costs. To bridge this gap, we propose GD-Adapt (Generative-Discriminative Adaptation), a novel TTA framework that harmonizes the robustness of generative diffusion models with the efficiency of discriminative regression networks via Bayesian Diffusion Distillation (BDD). Specifically, we introduce Auxiliary Generative Regularization (AGR) during pretraining to enforce manifold-aware feature learning. Extensive experiments across five cross-domain scenarios demonstrate our method’s superiority. For instance, on the challenging MOSI to SIMS shift, GD-Adapt reduces Mean Absolute Error (MAE) from 0.6872 to 0.5673 and boosts binary accuracy by 5.81 percentage points (reaching 57.33%). Notably, in scenarios such as SIMS to MOSI, we achieve an 11.18-point gain over the non-adapted baseline.

Person Re-Identification (ReID) has long struggled with the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level identity concepts. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising semantic understanding, existing methods typically adopt a static “one-pass” paradigm, converting images to text once for retrieval. This approach suffers from two critical flaws: Information Bottleneck, where converting rich visuals into text causes detail loss, and Open-Loop Failure, where initial hallucinations propagate without recourse. To address this, we propose Auto-ReID, a novel framework that reformulates ReID as an iterative “Think-and-Refine” process. We first introduce a Hierarchical Progressive Tuning strategy to transform a generic VLM into a specialized Re-ID expert. During inference, we deploy a closed-loop architecture comprising a Reasoner for structured attribute extraction, a Hybrid Retriever that anchors dynamic semantic queries with stable visual features to prevent drift, and a Corrector that deconstructs and verifies candidates to iteratively optimize the search. Extensive experiments on ReID datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in complex occlusion scenarios.

Text-based person anomaly search retrieves specific behavioral events from surveillance archives using natural-language queries. Although recent pose-aware methods align geometric structures well, they face a fundamental Pose-Semantic Gap: semantically different actions can share similar skeletal geometries. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can reduce this ambiguity, using them for large-scale retrieval is computationally prohibitive. We propose the Structure-Semantic Decoupled Cascade (SSDC) framework, which decouples retrieval into two stages: (1) Structure-Aware Coarse Retrieval, where a lightweight model quickly filters candidates by skeletal similarity; and (2) Detective Squad Interaction, a multi-agent semantic verification module. The squad consists of a Detective for fast binary filtering, an Analyst for evidence extraction, and a Writer for semantic synthesis. Finally, we re-rank candidates by fusing the synthesized captions with structural priors. Experiments on the PAB benchmark show that SSDC achieves state-of-the-art performance by balancing efficiency and semantic reasoning.

Al-powered people search platforms are increasingly deployed for recruiting, sales prospecting, and professional networking, yet no standardized benchmark exists for their rigorous evaluation. We present PEOPLESEARCHBENCH, an open-source benchmark comprising 119 multilingual queries across four scenarios: corporate recruiting, B2B sales prospecting, expert search, and influencer discovery. A central contribution is Criteria-Grounded Verification, an evaluation methodology that decomposes each query into explicit, independently checkable criteria and verifies each returned individual via live web search, producing factual relevance judgments rather than subjective LLM-as-judge scores. We evaluate four architecturally diverse platforms along three complementary dimensions-Relevance Precision, Effective Coverage, and Information Utility-and find that multi-source search agents significantly outperform single-domain systems, particularly in influencer discovery where the performance gap is largest. Platform rankings are robust across ablations on scoring thresholds, dimension weights, and judge models. All code, queries, and evaluation prompts are publicly available.

While diffusion and flow-matching models have advanced TTS, generating high-arousal emotions remains a persistent challenge due to the trade-off between stability and expressiveness. Existing systems often suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels under stable settings. In this work, we identify that standard Gaussian initialization inevitably introduces a neutral prosody bias, while uniform Classifier-Free Guidance often distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. To address this, we propose an inference framework that rectifies the emotional trajectory. An Emotion-Rectified Noise Prior injects a semantic gradient at initialization to align sampling with the target emotional manifold, and Likelihood-Inverse Guidance adaptively schedules guidance via a conditional/unconditional likelihood ratio, strengthening guidance only when the trajectory drifts toward a neutral fallback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively resolves the stability bottleneck in high-intensity scenarios, achieving superior linguistic accuracy and emotional fidelity without model retraining. Audio samples are available at https://showtts.github.io/emotionTTS/.

Deep Research systems based on web agents have shown strong potential in solving complex information-seeking tasks, yet their search efficiency remains underexplored. We observe that many state-of-the-art open-source web agents rely on long tool-call trajectories with cyclic reasoning loops and exploration of unproductive branches. To address this, we propose WebClipper, a framework that compresses web agent trajectories via graph-based pruning. Concretely, we model the agent’s search process as a state graph and cast trajectory optimization as a minimum-necessary Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) mining problem, yielding pruned trajectories that preserve essential reasoning while eliminating redundant steps. Continued training on these refined trajectories enables the agent to evolve toward more efficient search patterns and reduces tool-call rounds by about 20% while improving accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric called F-AE Score to measure the model’s overall performance in balancing accuracy and efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that WebClipper compresses tool-call rounds under excellent performance, providing practical insight into balancing effectiveness and efficiency in web agent design.

In recent years, CLIP-based text-video retrieval methods have developed rapidly, with research focusing on constructing diverse features and achieving effective interactions. However, the asymmetry of cross-modal information poses a challenge to accurately establishing retrieval relationships. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel video retrieval framework, termed the Dual-Pathway and Dual-View model (DPDV), which consists of the Dual-Pathway Partitioning Module (DPPM) for constructing features at an appropriate granularity and the Dual-View Interaction Module (DVIM) for performing effective feature interactions. For DPPM, we simulate a human macro-level cognitive perspective by partitioning visual features into two categories based on their relevance to the text query and supplementing less relevant features with additional textual information. For DVIM, we simulate a human alignment strategy from macro to micro levels, focusing on local visual features while comprehensively modeling fine-grained interactions. We evaluate DPDV on five benchmark datasets, achieving leading retrieval performance.

Text-based person search (TBPS) enables the retrieval of person images from large-scale databases using natural language descriptions, offering critical value in surveillance applications. However, a major challenge lies in the labor-intensive process of obtaining high-quality textual annotations, which limits scalability and practical deployment. To address this, we introduce two complementary modules: Multi-Turn Text Generation (MTG) and Multi-Turn Text Interaction (MTI). MTG generates rich pseudo-labels through simulated dialogues with MLLMs, producing fine-grained and diverse visual descriptions without manual supervision. MTI refines user queries at inference time through dynamic, dialogue-based reasoning, enabling the system to interpret and resolve vague, incomplete, or ambiguous descriptions—characteristics often seen in real-world search scenarios. Together, MTG and MTI form a unified and annotation-free framework that significantly improves retrieval accuracy, robustness, and usability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves competitive or superior results while eliminating the need for manual captions, paving the way for scalable and practical deployment of TBPS systems.