diff --git a/feed.xml b/feed.xml index f5463b5..181c58d 100644 --- a/feed.xml +++ b/feed.xml @@ -7,272 +7,160 @@ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification python-feedgen en - Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:02:44 +0000 + Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:02:42 +0000 - Memory Bank Compression for Continual Adaptation of Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00756 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.00756.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Thomas Katraouras, Dimitrios Rafailidis</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a mainstay for many everyday applications. However, as data evolve their knowledge quickly becomes outdated. Continual learning aims to update LLMs with new information without erasing previously acquired knowledge. Although methods such as full fine-tuning can incorporate new data, they are computationally expensive and prone to catastrophic forgetting, where prior knowledge is overwritten. Memory-augmented approaches address this by equipping LLMs with a memory bank, that is an external memory module which stores information for future use. However, these methods face a critical limitation, in particular, the memory bank constantly grows in the real-world scenario when large-scale data streams arrive. In this paper, we propose MBC, a model that compresses the memory bank through a codebook optimization strategy during online adaptation learning. To ensure stable learning, we also introduce an online resetting mechanism that prevents codebook collapse. In addition, we employ Key-Value Low-Rank Adaptation in the attention layers of the LLM, enabling efficient utilization of the compressed memory representations. Experiments with benchmark question-answering datasets demonstrate that MBC reduces the memory bank size to 0.3% when compared against the most competitive baseline, while maintaining high retention accuracy during online adaptation learning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Thomkat/MBC.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00756 - Fri, 02 Jan 2026 17:22:34 +0000 + More Images, More Problems? A Controlled Analysis of VLM Failure Modes + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07812 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.07812.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Anurag Das, Adrian Bulat, Alberto Baldrati, Ioannis Maniadis Metaxas, Bernt Schiele, Georgios Tzimiropoulos, Brais Martinez</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their proficiency in understanding and reasoning over multiple images remains largely unexplored. While existing benchmarks have initiated the evaluation of multi-image models, a comprehensive analysis of their core weaknesses and their causes is still lacking. In this work, we introduce MIMIC (Multi-Image Model Insights and Challenges), a new benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the multi-image capabilities of LVLMs. Using MIMIC, we conduct a series of diagnostic experiments that reveal pervasive issues: LVLMs often fail to aggregate information across images and struggle to track or attend to multiple concepts simultaneously. To address these failures, we propose two novel complementary remedies. On the data side, we present a procedural data-generation strategy that composes single-image annotations into rich, targeted multi-image training examples. On the optimization side, we analyze layer-wise attention patterns and derive an attention-masking scheme tailored for multi-image inputs. Experiments substantially improved cross-image aggregation, while also enhancing performance on existing multi-image benchmarks, outperforming prior state of the art across tasks. Data and code will be made available at https://github.com/anurag-198/MIMIC.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07812 + Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:45:13 +0000 - VIBE: Visual Instruction Based Editor - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02242 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.02242.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Grigorii Alekseenko, Aleksandr Gordeev, Irina Tolstykh, Bulat Suleimanov, Vladimir Dokholyan, Georgii Fedorov, Sergey Yakubson, Aleksandra Tsybina, Mikhail Chernyshov, Maksim Kuprashevich</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 54</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Instruction-based image editing is among the fastest developing areas in generative AI. Over the past year, the field has reached a new level, with dozens of open-source models released alongside highly capable commercial systems. However, only a limited number of open-source approaches currently achieve real-world quality. In addition, diffusion backbones, the dominant choice for these pipelines, are often large and computationally expensive for many deployments and research settings, with widely used variants typically containing 6B to 20B parameters. This paper presents a compact, high-throughput instruction-based image editing pipeline that uses a modern 2B-parameter Qwen3-VL model to guide the editing process and the 1.6B-parameter diffusion model Sana1.5 for image generation. Our design decisions across architecture, data processing, training configuration, and evaluation target low-cost inference and strict source consistency while maintaining high quality across the major edit categories feasible at this scale. Evaluated on the ImgEdit and GEdit benchmarks, the proposed method matches or exceeds the performance of substantially heavier baselines, including models with several times as many parameters and higher inference cost, and is particularly strong on edits that require preserving the input image, such as an attribute adjustment, object removal, background edits, and targeted replacement. The model fits within 24 GB of GPU memory and generates edited images at up to 2K resolution in approximately 4 seconds on an NVIDIA H100 in BF16, without additional inference optimizations or distillation.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02242 - Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:17:20 +0000 + RubricHub: A Comprehensive and Highly Discriminative Rubric Dataset via Automated Coarse-to-Fine Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08430 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.08430.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sunzhu Li, Jiale Zhao, Miteto Wei, Huimin Ren, Yang Zhou, Jingwen Yang, Shunyu Liu, Kaike Zhang, Wei Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in reasoning-intensive domains like mathematics. However, optimizing open-ended generation remains challenging due to the lack of ground truth. While rubric-based evaluation offers a structured proxy for verification, existing methods suffer from scalability bottlenecks and coarse criteria, resulting in a supervision ceiling effect. To address this, we propose an automated Coarse-to-Fine Rubric Generation framework. By synergizing principle-guided synthesis, multi-model aggregation, and difficulty evolution, our approach produces comprehensive and highly discriminative criteria capable of capturing the subtle nuances. Based on this framework, we introduce RubricHub, a large-scale (sim110k) and multi-domain dataset. We validate its utility through a two-stage post-training pipeline comprising Rubric-based Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RuFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RuRL). Experimental results demonstrate that RubricHub unlocks significant performance gains: our post-trained Qwen3-14B achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on HealthBench (69.3), surpassing proprietary frontier models such as GPT-5. The code and data will be released soon.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08430 + Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:56:39 +0000 - RigMo: Unifying Rig and Motion Learning for Generative Animation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06378 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.06378.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hao Zhang, Jiahao Luo, Bohui Wan, Yizhou Zhao, Zongrui Li, Michael Vasilkovsky, Chaoyang Wang, Jian Wang, Narendra Ahuja, Bing Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Despite significant progress in 4D generation, rig and motion, the core structural and dynamic components of animation are typically modeled as separate problems. Existing pipelines rely on ground-truth skeletons and skinning weights for motion generation and treat auto-rigging as an independent process, undermining scalability and interpretability. We present RigMo, a unified generative framework that jointly learns rig and motion directly from raw mesh sequences, without any human-provided rig annotations. RigMo encodes per-vertex deformations into two compact latent spaces: a rig latent that decodes into explicit Gaussian bones and skinning weights, and a motion latent that produces time-varying SE(3) transformations. Together, these outputs define an animatable mesh with explicit structure and coherent motion, enabling feed-forward rig and motion inference for deformable objects. Beyond unified rig-motion discovery, we introduce a Motion-DiT model operating in RigMo's latent space and demonstrate that these structure-aware latents can naturally support downstream motion generation tasks. Experiments on DeformingThings4D, Objaverse-XL, and TrueBones demonstrate that RigMo learns smooth, interpretable, and physically plausible rigs, while achieving superior reconstruction and category-level generalization compared to existing auto-rigging and deformation baselines. RigMo establishes a new paradigm for unified, structure-aware, and scalable dynamic 3D modeling.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06378 - Sat, 10 Jan 2026 01:26:28 +0000 + Your Group-Relative Advantage Is Biased + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08521 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.08521.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Fengkai Yang, Zherui Chen, Xiaohan Wang, Xiaodong Lu, Jiajun Chai, Guojun Yin, Wei Lin, Shuai Ma, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang, Yaodong Yang, Jianxin Li, Yikun Ban</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 95</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement Learning from Verifier Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a widely used approach for post-training large language models on reasoning tasks, with group-based methods such as GRPO and its variants gaining broad adoption. These methods rely on group-relative advantage estimation to avoid learned critics, yet its theoretical properties remain poorly understood. In this work, we uncover a fundamental issue of group-based RL: the group-relative advantage estimator is inherently biased relative to the true (expected) advantage. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that it systematically underestimates advantages for hard prompts and overestimates them for easy prompts, leading to imbalanced exploration and exploitation. To address this issue, we propose History-Aware Adaptive Difficulty Weighting (HA-DW), an adaptive reweighting scheme that adjusts advantage estimates based on an evolving difficulty anchor and training dynamics. Both theoretical analysis and experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that HA-DW consistently improves performance when integrated into GRPO and its variants. Our results suggest that correcting biased advantage estimation is critical for robust and efficient RLVR training.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08521 + Tue, 13 Jan 2026 13:03:15 +0000 - LSRIF: Logic-Structured Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06431 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.06431.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Qingyu Ren, Qianyu He, Jingwen Chang, Jie Zeng, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao, Han Xia, Zeye Sun, Fei Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Instruction-following is critical for large language models, but real-world instructions often contain logical structures such as sequential dependencies and conditional branching. Existing methods typically construct datasets with parallel constraints and optimize average rewards, ignoring logical dependencies and yielding noisy signals. We propose a logic-structured training framework LSRIF that explicitly models instruction logic. We first construct a dataset LSRInstruct with constraint structures such as parallel, sequential, and conditional types, and then design structure-aware rewarding method LSRIF including average aggregation for parallel structures, failure-penalty propagation for sequential structures, and selective rewards for conditional branches. Experiments show LSRIF brings significant improvements in instruction-following (in-domain and out-of-domain) and general reasoning. Analysis reveals that learning with explicit logic structures brings parameter updates in attention layers and sharpens token-level attention to constraints and logical operators.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06431 - Sat, 10 Jan 2026 05:11:38 +0000 + Entropy Sentinel: Continuous LLM Accuracy Monitoring from Decoding Entropy Traces in STEM + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09001 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09001.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pedro Memoli Buffa, Luciano Del Corro</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Deploying LLMs raises two coupled challenges: (1) monitoring - estimating where a model underperforms as traffic and domains drift - and (2) improvement - prioritizing data acquisition to close the largest performance gaps. We test whether an inference-time signal can estimate slice-level accuracy under domain shift. For each response, we compute an output-entropy profile from final-layer next-token probabilities (from top-k logprobs) and summarize it with eleven statistics. A lightweight classifier predicts instance correctness, and averaging predicted probabilities yields a domain-level accuracy estimate. We evaluate on ten STEM reasoning benchmarks with exhaustive train/test compositions (k in {1,2,3,4}; all "10 choose k" combinations), across nine LLMs from six families (3B-20B). Estimates often track held-out benchmark accuracy, and several models show near-monotonic ordering of domains. Output-entropy profiles are thus an accessible signal for scalable monitoring and for targeting data acquisition.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09001 + Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:54:38 +0000 - TAG-MoE: Task-Aware Gating for Unified Generative Mixture-of-Experts - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08881 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.08881.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yu Xu, Hongbin Yan, Juan Cao, Yiji Cheng, Tiankai Hang, Runze He, Zijin Yin, Shiyi Zhang, Yuxin Zhang, Jintao Li, Chunyu Wang, Qinglin Lu, Tong-Yee Lee, Fan Tang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Unified image generation and editing models suffer from severe task interference in dense diffusion transformers architectures, where a shared parameter space must compromise between conflicting objectives (e.g., local editing v.s. subject-driven generation). While the sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm is a promising solution, its gating networks remain task-agnostic, operating based on local features, unaware of global task intent. This task-agnostic nature prevents meaningful specialization and fails to resolve the underlying task interference. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to inject semantic intent into MoE routing. We introduce a Hierarchical Task Semantic Annotation scheme to create structured task descriptors (e.g., scope, type, preservation). We then design Predictive Alignment Regularization to align internal routing decisions with the task's high-level semantics. This regularization evolves the gating network from a task-agnostic executor to a dispatch center. Our model effectively mitigates task interference, outperforming dense baselines in fidelity and quality, and our analysis shows that experts naturally develop clear and semantically correlated specializations.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08881 - Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:52:45 +0000 + ProFit: Leveraging High-Value Signals in SFT via Probability-Guided Token Selection + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09195 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09195.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tao Liu, Taiqiang Wu, Runming Yang, Shaoning Sun, Junjie Wang, Yujiu Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a fundamental post-training strategy to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, traditional SFT often ignores the one-to-many nature of language by forcing alignment with a single reference answer, leading to the model overfitting to non-core expressions. Although our empirical analysis suggests that introducing multiple reference answers can mitigate this issue, the prohibitive data and computational costs necessitate a strategic shift: prioritizing the mitigation of single-reference overfitting over the costly pursuit of answer diversity. To achieve this, we reveal the intrinsic connection between token probability and semantic importance: high-probability tokens carry the core logical framework, while low-probability tokens are mostly replaceable expressions. Based on this insight, we propose ProFit, which selectively masks low-probability tokens to prevent surface-level overfitting. Extensive experiments confirm that ProFit consistently outperforms traditional SFT baselines on general reasoning and mathematical benchmarks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09195 + Wed, 14 Jan 2026 05:50:40 +0000 - Beyond Static Tools: Test-Time Tool Evolution for Scientific Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07641 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.07641.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiaxuan Lu, Ziyu Kong, Yemin Wang, Rong Fu, Haiyuan Wan, Cheng Yang, Wenjie Lou, Haoran Sun, Lilong Wang, Yankai Jiang, Xiaosong Wang, Xiao Sun, Dongzhan Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 42</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The central challenge of AI for Science is not reasoning alone, but the ability to create computational methods in an open-ended scientific world. Existing LLM-based agents rely on static, pre-defined tool libraries, a paradigm that fundamentally fails in scientific domains where tools are sparse, heterogeneous, and intrinsically incomplete. In this paper, we propose Test-Time Tool Evolution (TTE), a new paradigm that enables agents to synthesize, verify, and evolve executable tools during inference. By transforming tools from fixed resources into problem-driven artifacts, TTE overcomes the rigidity and long-tail limitations of static tool libraries. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce SciEvo, a benchmark comprising 1,590 scientific reasoning tasks supported by 925 automatically evolved tools. Extensive experiments show that TTE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and tool efficiency, while enabling effective cross-domain adaptation of computational tools. The code and benchmark have been released at https://github.com/lujiaxuan0520/Test-Time-Tool-Evol.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07641 - Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:22:51 +0000 + PhyRPR: Training-Free Physics-Constrained Video Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09255 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09255.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yibo Zhao, Hengjia Li, Xiaofei He, Boxi Wu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent diffusion-based video generation models can synthesize visually plausible videos, yet they often struggle to satisfy physical constraints. A key reason is that most existing approaches remain single-stage: they entangle high-level physical understanding with low-level visual synthesis, making it hard to generate content that require explicit physical reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free three-stage pipeline,PhyRPR:Phy\uline{Reason}--Phy\uline{Plan}--Phy\uline{Refine}, which decouples physical understanding from visual synthesis. Specifically, PhyReason uses a large multimodal model for physical state reasoning and an image generator for keyframe synthesis; PhyPlan deterministically synthesizes a controllable coarse motion scaffold; and PhyRefine injects this scaffold into diffusion sampling via a latent fusion strategy to refine appearance while preserving the planned dynamics. This staged design enables explicit physical control during generation. Extensive experiments under physics constraints show that our method consistently improves physical plausibility and motion controllability.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09255 + Wed, 14 Jan 2026 07:41:56 +0000 - Demystifying the Slash Pattern in Attention: The Role of RoPE - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08297 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.08297.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuan Cheng, Fengzhuo Zhang, Yunlong Hou, Cunxiao Du, Chao Du, Tianyu Pang, Aixin Sun, Zhuoran Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit slash attention patterns, where attention scores concentrate along the Δ-th sub-diagonal for some offset Δ. These patterns play a key role in passing information across tokens. But why do they emerge? In this paper, we demystify the emergence of these Slash-Dominant Heads (SDHs) from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. First, by analyzing open-source LLMs, we find that SDHs are intrinsic to models and generalize to out-of-distribution prompts. To explain the intrinsic emergence, we analyze the queries, keys, and Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), which jointly determine attention scores. Our empirical analysis reveals two characteristic conditions of SDHs: (1) Queries and keys are almost rank-one, and (2) RoPE is dominated by medium- and high-frequency components. Under these conditions, queries and keys are nearly identical across tokens, and interactions between medium- and high-frequency components of RoPE give rise to SDHs. Beyond empirical evidence, we theoretically show that these conditions are sufficient to ensure the emergence of SDHs by formalizing them as our modeling assumptions. Particularly, we analyze the training dynamics of a shallow Transformer equipped with RoPE under these conditions, and prove that models trained via gradient descent exhibit SDHs. The SDHs generalize to out-of-distribution prompts.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08297 - Tue, 13 Jan 2026 07:40:57 +0000 + PersonalAlign: Hierarchical Implicit Intent Alignment for Personalized GUI Agent with Long-Term User-Centric Records + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09636 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09636.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yibo Lyu, Gongwei Chen, Rui Shao, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> While GUI agents have shown strong performance under explicit and completion instructions, real-world deployment requires aligning with users' more complex implicit intents. In this work, we highlight Hierarchical Implicit Intent Alignment for Personalized GUI Agent (PersonalAlign), a new agent task that requires agents to leverage long-term user records as persistent context to resolve omitted preferences in vague instructions and anticipate latent routines by user state for proactive assistance. To facilitate this study, we introduce AndroidIntent, a benchmark designed to evaluate agents' ability in resolving vague instructions and providing proactive suggestions through reasoning over long-term user records. We annotated 775 user-specific preferences and 215 routines from 20k long-term records across different users for evaluation. Furthermore, we introduce Hierarchical Intent Memory Agent (HIM-Agent), which maintains a continuously updating personal memory and hierarchically organizes user preferences and routines for personalization. Finally, we evaluate a range of GUI agents on AndroidIntent, including GPT-5, Qwen3-VL, and UI-TARS, further results show that HIM-Agent significantly improves both execution and proactive performance by 15.7% and 7.3%.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09636 + Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:12:48 +0000 - Enhancing Sentiment Classification and Irony Detection in Large Language Models through Advanced Prompt Engineering Techniques - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08302 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.08302.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Marvin Schmitt, Anne Schwerk, Sebastian Lempert</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This study investigates the use of prompt engineering to enhance large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o-mini and gemini-1.5-flash, in sentiment analysis tasks. It evaluates advanced prompting techniques like few-shot learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and self-consistency against a baseline. Key tasks include sentiment classification, aspect-based sentiment analysis, and detecting subtle nuances such as irony. The research details the theoretical background, datasets, and methods used, assessing performance of LLMs as measured by accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 score. Findings reveal that advanced prompting significantly improves sentiment analysis, with the few-shot approach excelling in GPT-4o-mini and chain-of-thought prompting boosting irony detection in gemini-1.5-flash by up to 46%. Thus, while advanced prompting techniques overall improve performance, the fact that few-shot prompting works best for GPT-4o-mini and chain-of-thought excels in gemini-1.5-flash for irony detection suggests that prompting strategies must be tailored to both the model and the task. This highlights the importance of aligning prompt design with both the LLM's architecture and the semantic complexity of the task.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08302 - Tue, 13 Jan 2026 07:45:36 +0000 + Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10355 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10355.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhihao Xu, Rumei Li, Jiahuan Li, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Xiting Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 30</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively utilize tools in multi-turn interactions is essential for building capable autonomous agents. However, acquiring diverse and realistic multi-turn tool-use data remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a novel text-based paradigm. We observe that textual corpora naturally contain rich, multi-step problem-solving experiences, which can serve as an untapped, scalable, and authentic data source for multi-turn tool-use tasks. Based on this insight, we introduce GEM, a data synthesis pipeline that enables the generation and extraction of multi-turn tool-use trajectories from text corpora through a four-stage process: relevance filtering, workflow & tool extraction, trajectory grounding, and complexity refinement. To reduce the computational cost, we further train a specialized Trajectory Synthesizer via supervised fine-tuning. This model distills the complex generation pipeline into an efficient, end-to-end trajectory generator. Experiments demonstrate that our GEM-32B achieve a 16.5% improvement on the BFCL V3 Multi-turn benchmark. Our models partially surpass the performance of models trained on τ - bench (Airline and Retail) in-domain data, highlighting the superior generalization capability derived from our text-based synthesis paradigm. Notably, our Trajectory Synthesizer matches the quality of the full pipeline while significantly reducing inference latency and costs.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10355 + Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:58:46 +0000 - Rewarding the Rare: Uniqueness-Aware RL for Creative Problem Solving in LLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08763 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.08763.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhiyuan Hu, Yucheng Wang, Yufei He, Jiaying Wu, Yilun Zhao, See-Kiong Ng, Cynthia Breazeal, Anh Tuan Luu, Hae Won Park, Bryan Hooi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 125</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), particularly for complex reasoning tasks, yet it often suffers from exploration collapse: policies prematurely concentrate on a small set of dominant reasoning patterns, improving pass@1 while limiting rollout-level diversity and gains in pass@k. We argue that this failure stems from regularizing local token behavior rather than diversity over sets of solutions. To address this, we propose Uniqueness-Aware Reinforcement Learning, a rollout-level objective that explicitly rewards correct solutions that exhibit rare high-level strategies. Our method uses an LLM-based judge to cluster rollouts for the same problem according to their high-level solution strategies, ignoring superficial variations, and reweights policy advantages inversely with cluster size. As a result, correct but novel strategies receive higher rewards than redundant ones. Across mathematics, physics, and medical reasoning benchmarks, our approach consistently improves pass@k across large sampling budgets and increases the area under the pass@k curve (AUC@K) without sacrificing pass@1, while sustaining exploration and uncovering more diverse solution strategies at scale.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08763 - Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:48:43 +0000 + Future Optical Flow Prediction Improves Robot Control & Video Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10781 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10781.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kanchana Ranasinghe, Honglu Zhou, Yu Fang, Luyu Yang, Le Xue, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Michael S Ryoo, Juan Carlos Niebles</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Future motion representations, such as optical flow, offer immense value for control and generative tasks. However, forecasting generalizable spatially dense motion representations remains a key challenge, and learning such forecasting from noisy, real-world data remains relatively unexplored. We introduce FOFPred, a novel language-conditioned optical flow forecasting model featuring a unified Vision-Language Model (VLM) and Diffusion architecture. This unique combination enables strong multimodal reasoning with pixel-level generative fidelity for future motion prediction. Our model is trained on web-scale human activity data-a highly scalable but unstructured source. To extract meaningful signals from this noisy video-caption data, we employ crucial data preprocessing techniques and our unified architecture with strong image pretraining. The resulting trained model is then extended to tackle two distinct downstream tasks in control and generation. Evaluations across robotic manipulation and video generation under language-driven settings establish the cross-domain versatility of FOFPred, confirming the value of a unified VLM-Diffusion architecture and scalable learning from diverse web data for future optical flow prediction.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10781 + Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:49:48 +0000 - EvasionBench: Detecting Evasive Answers in Financial Q&A via Multi-Model Consensus and LLM-as-Judge - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09142 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09142.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shijian Ma, Yan Lin, Yi Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Detecting evasive answers in earnings calls is critical for financial transparency, yet progress is hindered by the lack of large-scale benchmarks. We introduce EvasionBench, comprising 30,000 training samples and 1,000 human-annotated test samples (Cohen's Kappa 0.835) across three evasion levels. Our key contribution is a multi-model annotation framework leveraging a core insight: disagreement between frontier LLMs signals hard examples most valuable for training. We mine boundary cases where two strong annotators conflict, using a judge to resolve labels. This approach outperforms single-model distillation by 2.4 percent, with judge-resolved samples improving generalization despite higher training loss (0.421 vs 0.393) - evidence that disagreement mining acts as implicit regularization. Our trained model Eva-4B (4B parameters) achieves 81.3 percent accuracy, outperforming its base by 25 percentage points and approaching frontier LLM performance at a fraction of inference cost.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09142 - Wed, 14 Jan 2026 04:26:43 +0000 + Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10825 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10825.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Junsol Kim, Shiyang Lai, Nino Scherrer, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, James Evans</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models have achieved remarkable capabilities across domains, yet mechanisms underlying sophisticated reasoning remain elusive. Recent reasoning models outperform comparable instruction-tuned models on complex cognitive tasks, attributed to extended computation through longer chains of thought. Here we show that enhanced reasoning emerges not from extended computation alone, but from simulating multi-agent-like interactions -- a society of thought -- which enables diversification and debate among internal cognitive perspectives characterized by distinct personality traits and domain expertise. Through quantitative analysis and mechanistic interpretability methods applied to reasoning traces, we find that reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B exhibit much greater perspective diversity than instruction-tuned models, activating broader conflict between heterogeneous personality- and expertise-related features during reasoning. This multi-agent structure manifests in conversational behaviors, including question-answering, perspective shifts, and the reconciliation of conflicting views, and in socio-emotional roles that characterize sharp back-and-forth conversations, together accounting for the accuracy advantage in reasoning tasks. Controlled reinforcement learning experiments reveal that base models increase conversational behaviors when rewarded solely for reasoning accuracy, and fine-tuning models with conversational scaffolding accelerates reasoning improvement over base models. These findings indicate that the social organization of thought enables effective exploration of solution spaces. We suggest that reasoning models establish a computational parallel to collective intelligence in human groups, where diversity enables superior problem-solving when systematically structured, which suggests new opportunities for agent organization to harness the wisdom of crowds.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10825 + Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:52:33 +0000 - V-DPM: 4D Video Reconstruction with Dynamic Point Maps - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09499 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09499.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Edgar Sucar, Eldar Insafutdinov, Zihang Lai, Andrea Vedaldi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Powerful 3D representations such as DUSt3R invariant point maps, which encode 3D shape and camera parameters, have significantly advanced feed forward 3D reconstruction. While point maps assume static scenes, Dynamic Point Maps (DPMs) extend this concept to dynamic 3D content by additionally representing scene motion. However, existing DPMs are limited to image pairs and, like DUSt3R, require post processing via optimization when more than two views are involved. We argue that DPMs are more useful when applied to videos and introduce V-DPM to demonstrate this. First, we show how to formulate DPMs for video input in a way that maximizes representational power, facilitates neural prediction, and enables reuse of pretrained models. Second, we implement these ideas on top of VGGT, a recent and powerful 3D reconstructor. Although VGGT was trained on static scenes, we show that a modest amount of synthetic data is sufficient to adapt it into an effective V-DPM predictor. Our approach achieves state of the art performance in 3D and 4D reconstruction for dynamic scenes. In particular, unlike recent dynamic extensions of VGGT such as P3, DPMs recover not only dynamic depth but also the full 3D motion of every point in the scene.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09499 - Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:03:42 +0000 + FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Composition + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10909 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10909.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chuqiao Li, Xianghui Xie, Yong Cao, Andreas Geiger, Gerard Pons-Moll</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Human motion generation from text prompts has made remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing methods primarily rely on either sequence-level or action-level descriptions due to the absence of fine-grained, part-level motion annotations. This limits their controllability over individual body parts. In this work, we construct a high-quality motion dataset with atomic, temporally-aware part-level text annotations, leveraging the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior datasets that either provide synchronized part captions with fixed time segments or rely solely on global sequence labels, our dataset captures asynchronous and semantically distinct part movements at fine temporal resolution. Based on this dataset, we introduce a diffusion-based part-aware motion generation framework, namely FrankenMotion, where each body part is guided by its own temporally-structured textual prompt. This is, to our knowledge, the first work to provide atomic, temporally-aware part-level motion annotations and have a model that allows motion generation with both spatial (body part) and temporal (atomic action) control. Experiments demonstrate that FrankenMotion outperforms all previous baseline models adapted and retrained for our setting, and our model can compose motions unseen during training. Our code and dataset will be publicly available upon publication.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10909 + Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:50:07 +0000 - Collaborative Multi-Agent Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09667 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09667.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhiyuan Hu, Yunhai Hu, Juncheng Liu, Shuyue Stella Li, Yucheng Wang, Zhen Xu, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu, Xinxing Xu, Bryan Hooi, Cynthia Breazeal, Hae Won Park</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 73</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multi-agent systems have evolved into practical LLM-driven collaborators for many applications, gaining robustness from diversity and cross-checking. However, multi-agent RL (MARL) training is resource-intensive and unstable: co-adapting teammates induce non-stationarity, and rewards are often sparse and high-variance. Therefore, we introduce Multi-Agent Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (MATTRL), a framework that injects structured textual experience into multi-agent deliberation at inference time. MATTRL forms a multi-expert team of specialists for multi-turn discussions, retrieves and integrates test-time experiences, and reaches consensus for final decision-making. We also study credit assignment for constructing a turn-level experience pool, then reinjecting it into the dialogue. Across challenging benchmarks in medicine, math, and education, MATTRL improves accuracy by an average of 3.67\% over a multi-agent baseline, and by 8.67\% over comparable single-agent baselines. Ablation studies examine different credit-assignment schemes and provide a detailed comparison of how they affect training outcomes. MATTRL offers a stable, effective and efficient path to distribution-shift-robust multi-agent reasoning without tuning.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09667 - Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:57:43 +0000 + What Matters in Data Curation for Multimodal Reasoning? Insights from the DCVLR Challenge + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10922 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10922.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yosub Shin, Michael Buriek, Boris Sobolev, Pavel Bushuyeu, Vikas Kumar, Haoyang Xu, Samuel Watson, Igor Molybog</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We study data curation for multimodal reasoning through the NeurIPS 2025 Data Curation for Vision-Language Reasoning (DCVLR) challenge, which isolates dataset selection by fixing the model and training protocol. Using a compact curated dataset derived primarily from Walton Multimodal Cold Start, our submission placed first in the challenge. Through post-competition ablations, we show that difficulty-based example selection on an aligned base dataset is the dominant driver of performance gains. Increasing dataset size does not reliably improve mean accuracy under the fixed training recipe, but mainly reduces run-to-run variance, while commonly used diversity and synthetic augmentation heuristics provide no additional benefit and often degrade performance. These results characterize DCVLR as a saturation-regime evaluation and highlight the central role of alignment and difficulty in data-efficient multimodal reasoning.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10922 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:50:01 +0000 - STEP3-VL-10B Technical Report - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09668 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09668.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ailin Huang, Chengyuan Yao, Chunrui Han, Fanqi Wan, Hangyu Guo, Haoran Lv, Hongyu Zhou, Jia Wang, Jian Zhou, Jianjian Sun, Jingcheng Hu, Kangheng Lin, Liang Zhao, Mitt Huang, Song Yuan, Wenwen Qu, Xiangfeng Wang, Yanlin Lai, Yingxiu Zhao, Yinmin Zhang, Yukang Shi, Yuyang Chen, Zejia Weng, Ziyang Meng, Ang Li, Aobo Kong, Bo Dong, Changyi Wan, David Wang, Di Qi, Dingming Li, En Yu, Guopeng Li, Haiquan Yin, Han Zhou, Hanshan Zhang, Haolong Yan, Hebin Zhou, Hongbo Peng, Jiaran Zhang, Jiashu Lv, Jiayi Fu, Jie Cheng, Jie Zhou, Jisheng Yin, Jingjing Xie, Jingwei Wu, Jun Zhang, Junfeng Liu, Kaijun Tan, Kaiwen Yan, Liangyu Chen, Lina Chen, Mingliang Li, Qian Zhao, Quan Sun, Shaoliang Pang, Shengjie Fan, Shijie Shang, Siyuan Zhang, Tianhao You, Wei Ji, Wuxun Xie, Xiaobo Yang, Xiaojie Hou, Xiaoran Jiao, Xiaoxiao Ren, Xiangwen Kong, Xin Huang, Xin Wu, Xing Chen, Xinran Wang, Xuelin Zhang, Yana Wei, Yang Li, Yanming Xu, Yeqing Shen, Yuang Peng, Yue Peng, Yu Zhou, Yusheng Li, Yuxiang Yang, Yuyang Zhang, Zhe Xie, Zhewei Huang, Zhenyi Lu, Zhimin Fan, Zihui Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Qi Han, Xiangyu Zhang, Yibo Zhu, Zheng Ge</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 161</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present STEP3-VL-10B, a lightweight open-source foundation model designed to redefine the trade-off between compact efficiency and frontier-level multimodal intelligence. STEP3-VL-10B is realized through two strategic shifts: first, a unified, fully unfrozen pre-training strategy on 1.2T multimodal tokens that integrates a language-aligned Perception Encoder with a Qwen3-8B decoder to establish intrinsic vision-language synergy; and second, a scaled post-training pipeline featuring over 1k iterations of reinforcement learning. Crucially, we implement Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) to scale test-time compute, allocating resources to scalable perceptual reasoning that explores and synthesizes diverse visual hypotheses. Consequently, despite its compact 10B footprint, STEP3-VL-10B rivals or surpasses models 10times-20times larger (e.g., GLM-4.6V-106B, Qwen3-VL-235B) and top-tier proprietary flagships like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Seed-1.5-VL. Delivering best-in-class performance, it records 92.2% on MMBench and 80.11% on MMMU, while excelling in complex reasoning with 94.43% on AIME2025 and 75.95% on MathVision. We release the full model suite to provide the community with a powerful, efficient, and reproducible baseline.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09668 - Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:58:24 +0000 + When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11000 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11000.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhongxiang Sun, Yi Zhan, Chenglei Shen, Weijie Yu, Xiao Zhang, Ming He, Jun Xu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 21</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Personalized large language models (LLMs) adapt model behavior to individual users to enhance user satisfaction, yet personalization can inadvertently distort factual reasoning. We show that when personalized LLMs face factual queries, there exists a phenomenon where the model generates answers aligned with a user's prior history rather than the objective truth, resulting in personalization-induced hallucinations that degrade factual reliability and may propagate incorrect beliefs, due to representational entanglement between personalization and factual representations. To address this issue, we propose Factuality-Preserving Personalized Steering (FPPS), a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions while preserving personalized behavior. We further introduce PFQABench, the first benchmark designed to jointly evaluate factual and personalized question answering under personalization. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and personalization methods show that FPPS substantially improves factual accuracy while maintaining personalized performance.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11000 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 05:20:10 +0000 - Patient-Similarity Cohort Reasoning in Clinical Text-to-SQL - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09876 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09876.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yifei Shen, Yilun Zhao, Justice Ou, Tinglin Huang, Arman Cohan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Real-world clinical text-to-SQL requires reasoning over heterogeneous EHR tables, temporal windows, and patient-similarity cohorts to produce executable queries. We introduce CLINSQL, a benchmark of 633 expert-annotated tasks on MIMIC-IV v3.1 that demands multi-table joins, clinically meaningful filters, and executable SQL. Solving CLINSQL entails navigating schema metadata and clinical coding systems, handling long contexts, and composing multi-step queries beyond traditional text-to-SQL. We evaluate 22 proprietary and open-source models under Chain-of-Thought self-refinement and use rubric-based SQL analysis with execution checks that prioritize critical clinical requirements. Despite recent advances, performance remains far from clinical reliability: on the test set, GPT-5-mini attains 74.7% execution score, DeepSeek-R1 leads open-source at 69.2% and Gemini-2.5-Pro drops from 85.5% on Easy to 67.2% on Hard. Progress on CLINSQL marks tangible advances toward clinically reliable text-to-SQL for real-world EHR analytics.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09876 - Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:12:06 +0000 + BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11037 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11037.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> RL-based agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex questions via dynamic planning and external search. While this approach significantly enhances accuracy with agent policies optimized via large-scale reinforcement learning, we identify a critical gap in reliability: these agents fail to recognize their reasoning boundaries and rarely admit ``I DON'T KNOW'' (IDK) even when evidence is insufficient or reasoning reaches its limit. The lack of reliability often leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks in many real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization (BAPO), a novel RL framework designed to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. BAPO introduces two key components: (i) a group-based boundary-aware reward that encourages an IDK response only when the reasoning reaches its limit, and (ii) an adaptive reward modulator that strategically suspends this reward during early exploration, preventing the model from exploiting IDK as a shortcut. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that BAPO substantially enhances the overall reliability of agentic search.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11037 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:06:58 +0000 - Transition Matching Distillation for Fast Video Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09881 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09881.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weili Nie, Julius Berner, Nanye Ma, Chao Liu, Saining Xie, Arash Vahdat</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large video diffusion and flow models have achieved remarkable success in high-quality video generation, but their use in real-time interactive applications remains limited due to their inefficient multi-step sampling process. In this work, we present Transition Matching Distillation (TMD), a novel framework for distilling video diffusion models into efficient few-step generators. The central idea of TMD is to match the multi-step denoising trajectory of a diffusion model with a few-step probability transition process, where each transition is modeled as a lightweight conditional flow. To enable efficient distillation, we decompose the original diffusion backbone into two components: (1) a main backbone, comprising the majority of early layers, that extracts semantic representations at each outer transition step; and (2) a flow head, consisting of the last few layers, that leverages these representations to perform multiple inner flow updates. Given a pretrained video diffusion model, we first introduce a flow head to the model, and adapt it into a conditional flow map. We then apply distribution matching distillation to the student model with flow head rollout in each transition step. Extensive experiments on distilling Wan2.1 1.3B and 14B text-to-video models demonstrate that TMD provides a flexible and strong trade-off between generation speed and visual quality. In particular, TMD outperforms existing distilled models under comparable inference costs in terms of visual fidelity and prompt adherence. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/tmd</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09881 - Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:30:03 +0000 + AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11044 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11044.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Keyu Li, Junhao Shi, Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Yunze Wu, Shijie Xia, Xiaojie Cai, Tianze Xu, Weiye Si, Wenjie Li, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) based autonomous agents demonstrate multifaceted capabilities to contribute substantially to economic production. However, existing benchmarks remain focused on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. Moreover, the reliance on human-in-the-loop feedback for realistic tasks creates a scalability bottleneck, hindering automated rollout collection and evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgencyBench, a comprehensive benchmark derived from daily AI usage, evaluating 6 core agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios, comprising 138 tasks with specific queries, deliverables, and rubrics. These scenarios require an average of 90 tool calls, 1 million tokens, and hours of execution time to resolve. To enable automated evaluation, we employ a user simulation agent to provide iterative feedback, and a Docker sandbox to conduct visual and functional rubric-based assessment. Experiments reveal that closed-source models significantly outperform open-source models (48.4% vs 32.1%). Further analysis reveals significant disparities across models in resource efficiency, feedback-driven self-correction, and specific tool-use preferences. Finally, we investigate the impact of agentic scaffolds, observing that proprietary models demonstrate superior performance within their native ecosystems (e.g., Claude-4.5-Opus via Claude-Agent-SDK), while open-source models exhibit distinct performance peaks, suggesting potential optimization for specific execution frameworks. AgencyBench serves as a critical testbed for next-generation agents, highlighting the necessity of co-optimizing model architecture with agentic frameworks. We believe this work sheds light on the future direction of autonomous agents, and we release the full benchmark and evaluation toolkit at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/AgencyBench.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11044 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:22:20 +0000 - CaMeLs Can Use Computers Too: System-level Security for Computer Use Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09923 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.09923.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hanna Foerster, Robert Mullins, Tom Blanchard, Nicolas Papernot, Kristina Nikolić, Florian Tramèr, Ilia Shumailov, Cheng Zhang, Yiren Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> AI agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious content hijacks agent behavior to steal credentials or cause financial loss. The only known robust defense is architectural isolation that strictly separates trusted task planning from untrusted environment observations. However, applying this design to Computer Use Agents (CUAs) -- systems that automate tasks by viewing screens and executing actions -- presents a fundamental challenge: current agents require continuous observation of UI state to determine each action, conflicting with the isolation required for security. We resolve this tension by demonstrating that UI workflows, while dynamic, are structurally predictable. We introduce Single-Shot Planning for CUAs, where a trusted planner generates a complete execution graph with conditional branches before any observation of potentially malicious content, providing provable control flow integrity guarantees against arbitrary instruction injections. Although this architectural isolation successfully prevents instruction injections, we show that additional measures are needed to prevent Branch Steering attacks, which manipulate UI elements to trigger unintended valid paths within the plan. We evaluate our design on OSWorld, and retain up to 57% of the performance of frontier models while improving performance for smaller open-source models by up to 19%, demonstrating that rigorous security and utility can coexist in CUAs.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09923 - Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:06:35 +0000 + PhysRVG: Physics-Aware Unified Reinforcement Learning for Video Generative Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11087 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11087.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Qiyuan Zhang, Biao Gong, Shuai Tan, Zheng Zhang, Yujun Shen, Xing Zhu, Yuyuan Li, Kelu Yao, Chunhua Shen, Changqing Zou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Physical principles are fundamental to realistic visual simulation, but remain a significant oversight in transformer-based video generation. This gap highlights a critical limitation in rendering rigid body motion, a core tenet of classical mechanics. While computer graphics and physics-based simulators can easily model such collisions using Newton formulas, modern pretrain-finetune paradigms discard the concept of object rigidity during pixel-level global denoising. Even perfectly correct mathematical constraints are treated as suboptimal solutions (i.e., conditions) during model optimization in post-training, fundamentally limiting the physical realism of generated videos. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce, for the first time, a physics-aware reinforcement learning paradigm for video generation models that enforces physical collision rules directly in high-dimensional spaces, ensuring the physics knowledge is strictly applied rather than treated as conditions. Subsequently, we extend this paradigm to a unified framework, termed Mimicry-Discovery Cycle (MDcycle), which allows substantial fine-tuning while fully preserving the model's ability to leverage physics-grounded feedback. To validate our approach, we construct new benchmark PhysRVGBench and perform extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to thoroughly assess its effectiveness.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11087 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 08:40:10 +0000 - CoF-T2I: Video Models as Pure Visual Reasoners for Text-to-Image Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10061 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10061.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chengzhuo Tong, Mingkun Chang, Shenglong Zhang, Yuran Wang, Cheng Liang, Zhizheng Zhao, Ruichuan An, Bohan Zeng, Yang Shi, Yifan Dai, Ziming Zhao, Guanbin Li, Pengfei Wan, Yuanxing Zhang, Wentao Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 28</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent video generation models have revealed the emergence of Chain-of-Frame (CoF) reasoning, enabling frame-by-frame visual inference. With this capability, video models have been successfully applied to various visual tasks (e.g., maze solving, visual puzzles). However, their potential to enhance text-to-image (T2I) generation remains largely unexplored due to the absence of a clearly defined visual reasoning starting point and interpretable intermediate states in the T2I generation process. To bridge this gap, we propose CoF-T2I, a model that integrates CoF reasoning into T2I generation via progressive visual refinement, where intermediate frames act as explicit reasoning steps and the final frame is taken as output. To establish such an explicit generation process, we curate CoF-Evol-Instruct, a dataset of CoF trajectories that model the generation process from semantics to aesthetics. To further improve quality and avoid motion artifacts, we enable independent encoding operation for each frame. Experiments show that CoF-T2I significantly outperforms the base video model and achieves competitive performance on challenging benchmarks, reaching 0.86 on GenEval and 7.468 on Imagine-Bench. These results indicate the substantial promise of video models for advancing high-quality text-to-image generation.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10061 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 04:33:06 +0000 + Language of Thought Shapes Output Diversity in Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11227 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11227.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shaoyang Xu, Wenxuan Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Output diversity is crucial for Large Language Models as it underpins pluralism and creativity. In this work, we reveal that controlling the language used during model thinking-the language of thought-provides a novel and structural source of output diversity. Our preliminary study shows that different thinking languages occupy distinct regions in a model's thinking space. Based on this observation, we study two repeated sampling strategies under multilingual thinking-Single-Language Sampling and Mixed-Language Sampling-and conduct diversity evaluation on outputs that are controlled to be in English, regardless of the thinking language used. Across extensive experiments, we demonstrate that switching the thinking language from English to non-English languages consistently increases output diversity, with a clear and consistent positive correlation such that languages farther from English in the thinking space yield larger gains. We further show that aggregating samples across multiple thinking languages yields additional improvements through compositional effects, and that scaling sampling with linguistic heterogeneity expands the model's diversity ceiling. Finally, we show that these findings translate into practical benefits in pluralistic alignment scenarios, leading to broader coverage of cultural knowledge and value orientations in LLM outputs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/Multilingual-LoT-Diversity.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11227 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:14:16 +0000 - Deriving Character Logic from Storyline as Codified Decision Trees - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10080 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10080.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Letian Peng, Kun Zhou, Longfei Yun, Yupeng Hou, Jingbo Shang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Role-playing (RP) agents rely on behavioral profiles to act consistently across diverse narrative contexts, yet existing profiles are largely unstructured, non-executable, and weakly validated, leading to brittle agent behavior. We propose Codified Decision Trees (CDT), a data-driven framework that induces an executable and interpretable decision structure from large-scale narrative data. CDT represents behavioral profiles as a tree of conditional rules, where internal nodes correspond to validated scene conditions and leaves encode grounded behavioral statements, enabling deterministic retrieval of context-appropriate rules at execution time. The tree is learned by iteratively inducing candidate scene-action rules, validating them against data, and refining them through hierarchical specialization, yielding profiles that support transparent inspection and principled updates. Across multiple benchmarks, CDT substantially outperforms human-written profiles and prior profile induction methods on 85 characters across 16 artifacts, indicating that codified and validated behavioral representations lead to more reliable agent grounding.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10080 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 05:12:43 +0000 + AstroReason-Bench: Evaluating Unified Agentic Planning across Heterogeneous Space Planning Problems + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11354 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11354.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weiyi Wang, Xinchi Chen, Jingjing Gong, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) have positioned them as generalist planners capable of reasoning and acting across diverse tasks. However, existing agent benchmarks largely focus on symbolic or weakly grounded environments, leaving their performance in physics-constrained real-world domains underexplored. We introduce AstroReason-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating agentic planning in Space Planning Problems (SPP), a family of high-stakes problems with heterogeneous objectives, strict physical constraints, and long-horizon decision-making. AstroReason-Bench integrates multiple scheduling regimes, including ground station communication and agile Earth observation, and provides a unified agent-oriented interaction protocol. Evaluating on a range of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source agentic LLM systems, we find that current agents substantially underperform specialized solvers, highlighting key limitations of generalist planning under realistic constraints. AstroReason-Bench offers a challenging and diagnostic testbed for future agentic research.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11354 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:02:41 +0000 - FlowAct-R1: Towards Interactive Humanoid Video Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10103 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10103.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lizhen Wang, Yongming Zhu, Zhipeng Ge, Youwei Zheng, Longhao Zhang, Tianshu Hu, Shiyang Qin, Mingshuang Luo, Jiaxu Zhang, Xin Chen, Yulong Wang, Zerong Zheng, Jianwen Jiang, Chao Liang, Weifeng Chen, Xing Wang, Yuan Zhang, Mingyuan Gao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 17</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Interactive humanoid video generation aims to synthesize lifelike visual agents that can engage with humans through continuous and responsive video. Despite recent advances in video synthesis, existing methods often grapple with the trade-off between high-fidelity synthesis and real-time interaction requirements. In this paper, we propose FlowAct-R1, a framework specifically designed for real-time interactive humanoid video generation. Built upon a MMDiT architecture, FlowAct-R1 enables the streaming synthesis of video with arbitrary durations while maintaining low-latency responsiveness. We introduce a chunkwise diffusion forcing strategy, complemented by a novel self-forcing variant, to alleviate error accumulation and ensure long-term temporal consistency during continuous interaction. By leveraging efficient distillation and system-level optimizations, our framework achieves a stable 25fps at 480p resolution with a time-to-first-frame (TTFF) of only around 1.5 seconds. The proposed method provides holistic and fine-grained full-body control, enabling the agent to transition naturally between diverse behavioral states in interactive scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that FlowAct-R1 achieves exceptional behavioral vividness and perceptual realism, while maintaining robust generalization across diverse character styles.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10103 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 06:16:22 +0000 + ACoT-VLA: Action Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11404 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11404.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Linqing Zhong, Yi Liu, Yifei Wei, Ziyu Xiong, Maoqing Yao, Si Liu, Guanghui Ren</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as essential generalist robot policies for diverse manipulation tasks, conventionally relying on directly translating multimodal inputs into actions via Vision-Language Model (VLM) embeddings. Recent advancements have introduced explicit intermediary reasoning, such as sub-task prediction (language) or goal image synthesis (vision), to guide action generation. However, these intermediate reasoning are often indirect and inherently limited in their capacity to convey the full, granular information required for precise action execution. Instead, we posit that the most effective form of reasoning is one that deliberates directly in the action space. We introduce Action Chain-of-Thought (ACoT), a paradigm where the reasoning process itself is formulated as a structured sequence of coarse action intents that guide the final policy. In this paper, we propose ACoT-VLA, a novel architecture that materializes the ACoT paradigm. Specifically, we introduce two complementary components: an Explicit Action Reasoner (EAR) and Implicit Action Reasoner (IAR). The former proposes coarse reference trajectories as explicit action-level reasoning steps, while the latter extracts latent action priors from internal representations of multimodal input, co-forming an ACoT that conditions the downstream action head to enable grounded policy learning. Extensive experiments in real-world and simulation environments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, which achieves 98.5%, 84.1%, and 47.4% on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus and VLABench, respectively.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11404 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:17:06 +0000 - VQ-Seg: Vector-Quantized Token Perturbation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10124 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10124.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sicheng Yang, Zhaohu Xing, Lei Zhu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Consistency learning with feature perturbation is a widely used strategy in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. However, many existing perturbation methods rely on dropout, and thus require a careful manual tuning of the dropout rate, which is a sensitive hyperparameter and often difficult to optimize and may lead to suboptimal regularization. To overcome this limitation, we propose VQ-Seg, the first approach to employ vector quantization (VQ) to discretize the feature space and introduce a novel and controllable Quantized Perturbation Module (QPM) that replaces dropout. Our QPM perturbs discrete representations by shuffling the spatial locations of codebook indices, enabling effective and controllable regularization. To mitigate potential information loss caused by quantization, we design a dual-branch architecture where the post-quantization feature space is shared by both image reconstruction and segmentation tasks. Moreover, we introduce a Post-VQ Feature Adapter (PFA) to incorporate guidance from a foundation model (FM), supplementing the high-level semantic information lost during quantization. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale Lung Cancer (LC) dataset comprising 828 CT scans annotated for central-type lung carcinoma. Extensive experiments on the LC dataset and other public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Code available at: https://github.com/script-Yang/VQ-Seg.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10124 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:09:00 +0000 + The Poisoned Apple Effect: Strategic Manipulation of Mediated Markets via Technology Expansion of AI Agents + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11496 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11496.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Eilam Shapira, Roi Reichart, Moshe Tennenholtz</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 39</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The integration of AI agents into economic markets fundamentally alters the landscape of strategic interaction. We investigate the economic implications of expanding the set of available technologies in three canonical game-theoretic settings: bargaining (resource division), negotiation (asymmetric information trade), and persuasion (strategic information transmission). We find that simply increasing the choice of AI delegates can drastically shift equilibrium payoffs and regulatory outcomes, often creating incentives for regulators to proactively develop and release technologies. Conversely, we identify a strategic phenomenon termed the "Poisoned Apple" effect: an agent may release a new technology, which neither they nor their opponent ultimately uses, solely to manipulate the regulator's choice of market design in their favor. This strategic release improves the releaser's welfare at the expense of their opponent and the regulator's fairness objectives. Our findings demonstrate that static regulatory frameworks are vulnerable to manipulation via technology expansion, necessitating dynamic market designs that adapt to the evolving landscape of AI capabilities.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11496 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:18:03 +0000 - LaViT: Aligning Latent Visual Thoughts for Multi-modal Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10129 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10129.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Linquan Wu, Tianxiang Jiang, Yifei Dong, Haoyu Yang, Fengji Zhang, Shichaang Meng, Ai Xuan, Linqi Song, Jacky Keung</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Current multimodal latent reasoning often relies on external supervision (e.g., auxiliary images), ignoring intrinsic visual attention dynamics. In this work, we identify a critical Perception Gap in distillation: student models frequently mimic a teacher's textual output while attending to fundamentally divergent visual regions, effectively relying on language priors rather than grounded perception. To bridge this, we propose LaViT, a framework that aligns latent visual thoughts rather than static embeddings. LaViT compels the student to autoregressively reconstruct the teacher's visual semantics and attention trajectories prior to text generation, employing a curriculum sensory gating mechanism to prevent shortcut learning. Extensive experiments show that LaViT significantly enhances visual grounding, achieving up to +16.9% gains on complex reasoning tasks and enabling a compact 3B model to outperform larger open-source variants and proprietary models like GPT-4o.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10129 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:14:24 +0000 + ShapeR: Robust Conditional 3D Shape Generation from Casual Captures + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11514 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11514.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yawar Siddiqui, Duncan Frost, Samir Aroudj, Armen Avetisyan, Henry Howard-Jenkins, Daniel DeTone, Pierre Moulon, Qirui Wu, Zhengqin Li, Julian Straub, Richard Newcombe, Jakob Engel</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in 3D shape generation have achieved impressive results, but most existing methods rely on clean, unoccluded, and well-segmented inputs. Such conditions are rarely met in real-world scenarios. We present ShapeR, a novel approach for conditional 3D object shape generation from casually captured sequences. Given an image sequence, we leverage off-the-shelf visual-inertial SLAM, 3D detection algorithms, and vision-language models to extract, for each object, a set of sparse SLAM points, posed multi-view images, and machine-generated captions. A rectified flow transformer trained to effectively condition on these modalities then generates high-fidelity metric 3D shapes. To ensure robustness to the challenges of casually captured data, we employ a range of techniques including on-the-fly compositional augmentations, a curriculum training scheme spanning object- and scene-level datasets, and strategies to handle background clutter. Additionally, we introduce a new evaluation benchmark comprising 178 in-the-wild objects across 7 real-world scenes with geometry annotations. Experiments show that ShapeR significantly outperforms existing approaches in this challenging setting, achieving an improvement of 2.7x in Chamfer distance compared to state of the art.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11514 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:51:24 +0000 - M^4olGen: Multi-Agent, Multi-Stage Molecular Generation under Precise Multi-Property Constraints - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10131 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10131.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yizhan Li, Florence Cloutier, Sifan Wu, Ali Parviz, Boris Knyazev, Yan Zhang, Glen Berseth, Bang Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Generating molecules that satisfy precise numeric constraints over multiple physicochemical properties is critical and challenging. Although large language models (LLMs) are expressive, they struggle with precise multi-objective control and numeric reasoning without external structure and feedback. We introduce M olGen, a fragment-level, retrieval-augmented, two-stage framework for molecule generation under multi-property constraints. Stage I : Prototype generation: a multi-agent reasoner performs retrieval-anchored, fragment-level edits to produce a candidate near the feasible region. Stage II : RL-based fine-grained optimization: a fragment-level optimizer trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) applies one- or multi-hop refinements to explicitly minimize the property errors toward our target while regulating edit complexity and deviation from the prototype. A large, automatically curated dataset with reasoning chains of fragment edits and measured property deltas underpins both stages, enabling deterministic, reproducible supervision and controllable multi-hop reasoning. Unlike prior work, our framework better reasons about molecules by leveraging fragments and supports controllable refinement toward numeric targets. Experiments on generation under two sets of property constraints (QED, LogP, Molecular Weight and HOMO, LUMO) show consistent gains in validity and precise satisfaction of multi-property targets, outperforming strong LLMs and graph-based algorithms.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10131 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:18:05 +0000 - - - ToolSafe: Enhancing Tool Invocation Safety of LLM-based agents via Proactive Step-level Guardrail and Feedback - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10156 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10156.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yutao Mou, Zhangchi Xue, Lijun Li, Peiyang Liu, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye, Jing Shao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 20</p><p><b>Summary:</b> While LLM-based agents can interact with environments via invoking external tools, their expanded capabilities also amplify security risks. Monitoring step-level tool invocation behaviors in real time and proactively intervening before unsafe execution is critical for agent deployment, yet remains under-explored. In this work, we first construct TS-Bench, a novel benchmark for step-level tool invocation safety detection in LLM agents. We then develop a guardrail model, TS-Guard, using multi-task reinforcement learning. The model proactively detects unsafe tool invocation actions before execution by reasoning over the interaction history. It assesses request harmfulness and action-attack correlations, producing interpretable and generalizable safety judgments and feedback. Furthermore, we introduce TS-Flow, a guardrail-feedback-driven reasoning framework for LLM agents, which reduces harmful tool invocations of ReAct-style agents by 65 percent on average and improves benign task completion by approximately 10 percent under prompt injection attacks.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10156 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:54:32 +0000 - - - PRL: Process Reward Learning Improves LLMs' Reasoning Ability and Broadens the Reasoning Boundary - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10201 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10201.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiarui Yao, Ruida Wang, Tong Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a continuous topic recently. But most relevant works are based on outcome rewards at the trajectory level, missing fine-grained supervision during the reasoning process. Other existing training frameworks that try to combine process signals together to optimize LLMs also rely heavily on tedious additional steps like MCTS, training a separate reward model, etc., doing harm to the training efficiency. Moreover, the intuition behind the process signals design lacks rigorous theoretical support, leaving the understanding of the optimization mechanism opaque. In this paper, we propose Process Reward Learning (PRL), which decomposes the entropy regularized reinforcement learning objective into intermediate steps, with rigorous process rewards that could be assigned to models accordingly. Starting from theoretical motivation, we derive the formulation of PRL that is essentially equivalent to the objective of reward maximization plus a KL-divergence penalty term between the policy model and a reference model. However, PRL could turn the outcome reward into process supervision signals, which helps better guide the exploration during RL optimization. From our experiment results, we demonstrate that PRL not only improves the average performance for LLMs' reasoning ability measured by average @ n, but also broadens the reasoning boundary by improving the pass @ n metric. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of PRL could be verified and generalized.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10201 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:01:53 +0000 - - - DanQing: An Up-to-Date Large-Scale Chinese Vision-Language Pre-training Dataset - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10305 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10305.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hengyu Shen, Tiancheng Gu, Bin Qin, Lan Wu, Yuling Wu, Shuo Tan, Zelong Sun, Jun Wang, Nan Wu, Xiang An, Weidong Cai, Ziyong Feng, Kaicheng Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 32</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models demonstrate strong performance across various downstream tasks by learning from large-scale image-text pairs through contrastive pretraining. The release of extensive English image-text datasets (e.g., COYO-700M and LAION-400M) has enabled widespread adoption of models such as CLIP and SigLIP in tasks including cross-modal retrieval and image captioning. However, the advancement of Chinese vision-language pretraining has substantially lagged behind, due to the scarcity of high-quality Chinese image-text data. To address this gap, we develop a comprehensive pipeline for constructing a high-quality Chinese cross-modal dataset. As a result, we propose DanQing, which contains 100 million image-text pairs collected from Common Crawl. Different from existing datasets, DanQing is curated through a more rigorous selection process, yielding superior data quality. Moreover, DanQing is primarily built from 2024-2025 web data, enabling models to better capture evolving semantic trends and thus offering greater practical utility. We compare DanQing with existing datasets by continual pre-training of the SigLIP2 model. Experimental results show that DanQing consistently achieves superior performance across a range of Chinese downstream tasks, including zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, and LMM-based evaluations. To facilitate further research in Chinese vision-language pre-training, we will open-source the DanQing dataset under the Creative Common CC-BY 4.0 license.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10305 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:28:58 +0000 - - - Think-Then-Generate: Reasoning-Aware Text-to-Image Diffusion with LLM Encoders - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10332 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10332.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Siqi Kou, Jiachun Jin, Zetong Zhou, Ye Ma, Yugang Wang, Quan Chen, Peng Jiang, Xiao Yang, Jun Zhu, Kai Yu, Zhijie Deng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models (DMs) has enabled high-quality visual synthesis from diverse textual prompts. Yet, most existing T2I DMs, even those equipped with large language model (LLM)-based text encoders, remain text-pixel mappers -- they employ LLMs merely as text encoders, without leveraging their inherent reasoning capabilities to infer what should be visually depicted given the textual prompt. To move beyond such literal generation, we propose the think-then-generate (T2G) paradigm, where the LLM-based text encoder is encouraged to reason about and rewrite raw user prompts; the states of the rewritten prompts then serve as diffusion conditioning. To achieve this, we first activate the think-then-rewrite pattern of the LLM encoder with a lightweight supervised fine-tuning process. Subsequently, the LLM encoder and diffusion backbone are co-optimized to ensure faithful reasoning about the context and accurate rendering of the semantics via Dual-GRPO. In particular, the text encoder is reinforced using image-grounded rewards to infer and recall world knowledge, while the diffusion backbone is pushed to produce semantically consistent and visually coherent images. Experiments show substantial improvements in factual consistency, semantic alignment, and visual realism across reasoning-based image generation and editing benchmarks, achieving 0.79 on WISE score, nearly on par with GPT-4. Our results constitute a promising step toward next-generation unified models with reasoning, expression, and demonstration capacities.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10332 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:19:05 +0000 - - - Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10338 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10338.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yi Liu, Weizhe Wang, Ruitao Feng, Yao Zhang, Guangquan Xu, Gelei Deng, Yuekang Li, Leo Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The rise of AI agent frameworks has introduced agent skills, modular packages containing instructions and executable code that dynamically extend agent capabilities. While this architecture enables powerful customization, skills execute with implicit trust and minimal vetting, creating a significant yet uncharacterized attack surface. We conduct the first large-scale empirical security analysis of this emerging ecosystem, collecting 42,447 skills from two major marketplaces and systematically analyzing 31,132 using SkillScan, a multi-stage detection framework integrating static analysis with LLM-based semantic classification. Our findings reveal pervasive security risks: 26.1% of skills contain at least one vulnerability, spanning 14 distinct patterns across four categories: prompt injection, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, and supply chain risks. Data exfiltration (13.3%) and privilege escalation (11.8%) are most prevalent, while 5.2% of skills exhibit high-severity patterns strongly suggesting malicious intent. We find that skills bundling executable scripts are 2.12x more likely to contain vulnerabilities than instruction-only skills (OR=2.12, p<0.001). Our contributions include: (1) a grounded vulnerability taxonomy derived from 8,126 vulnerable skills, (2) a validated detection methodology achieving 86.7% precision and 82.5% recall, and (3) an open dataset and detection toolkit to support future research. These results demonstrate an urgent need for capability-based permission systems and mandatory security vetting before this attack vector is further exploited.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10338 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:31:52 +0000 - - - Toward Ultra-Long-Horizon Agentic Science: Cognitive Accumulation for Machine Learning Engineering - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10402 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10402.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xinyu Zhu, Yuzhu Cai, Zexi Liu, Bingyang Zheng, Cheng Wang, Rui Ye, Jiaao Chen, Hanrui Wang, Wei-Chen Wang, Yuzhi Zhang, Linfeng Zhang, Weinan E, Di Jin, Siheng Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 34</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The advancement of artificial intelligence toward agentic science is currently bottlenecked by the challenge of ultra-long-horizon autonomy, the ability to sustain strategic coherence and iterative correction over experimental cycles spanning days or weeks. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated prowess in short-horizon reasoning, they are easily overwhelmed by execution details in the high-dimensional, delayed-feedback environments of real-world research, failing to consolidate sparse feedback into coherent long-term guidance. Here, we present ML-Master 2.0, an autonomous agent that masters ultra-long-horizon machine learning engineering (MLE) which is a representative microcosm of scientific discovery. By reframing context management as a process of cognitive accumulation, our approach introduces Hierarchical Cognitive Caching (HCC), a multi-tiered architecture inspired by computer systems that enables the structural differentiation of experience over time. By dynamically distilling transient execution traces into stable knowledge and cross-task wisdom, HCC allows agents to decouple immediate execution from long-term experimental strategy, effectively overcoming the scaling limits of static context windows. In evaluations on OpenAI's MLE-Bench under 24-hour budgets, ML-Master 2.0 achieves a state-of-the-art medal rate of 56.44%. Our findings demonstrate that ultra-long-horizon autonomy provides a scalable blueprint for AI capable of autonomous exploration beyond human-precedent complexities.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10402 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:52:04 +0000 - - - Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10477 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10477.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yu Wang, Yi Wang, Rui Dai, Yujie Wang, Kaikui Liu, Xiangxiang Chu, Yansheng Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 148</p><p><b>Summary:</b> As hubs of human activity, urban surfaces consist of a wealth of semantic entities. Segmenting these various entities from satellite imagery is crucial for a range of downstream applications. Current advanced segmentation models can reliably segment entities defined by physical attributes (e.g., buildings, water bodies) but still struggle with socially defined categories (e.g., schools, parks). In this work, we achieve socio-semantic segmentation by vision-language model reasoning. To facilitate this, we introduce the Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation dataset named SocioSeg, a new resource comprising satellite imagery, digital maps, and pixel-level labels of social semantic entities organized in a hierarchical structure. Additionally, we propose a novel vision-language reasoning framework called SocioReasoner that simulates the human process of identifying and annotating social semantic entities via cross-modal recognition and multi-stage reasoning. We employ reinforcement learning to optimize this non-differentiable process and elicit the reasoning capabilities of the vision-language model. Experiments demonstrate our approach's gains over state-of-the-art models and strong zero-shot generalization. Our dataset and code are available in https://github.com/AMAP-ML/SocioReasoner.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10477 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:00:36 +0000 - - - A Safety Report on GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, Qwen3-VL, Doubao 1.8, Grok 4.1 Fast, Nano Banana Pro, and Seedream 4.5 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10527 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10527.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xingjun Ma, Yixu Wang, Hengyuan Xu, Yutao Wu, Yifan Ding, Yunhan Zhao, Zilong Wang, Jiabin Hua, Ming Wen, Jianan Liu, Ranjie Duan, Yifeng Gao, Yingshui Tan, Yunhao Chen, Hui Xue, Xin Wang, Wei Cheng, Jingjing Chen, Zuxuan Wu, Bo Li, Yu-Gang Jiang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has produced substantial gains in reasoning, perception, and generative capability across language and vision. However, whether these advances yield commensurate improvements in safety remains unclear, in part due to fragmented evaluation practices limited to single modalities or threat models. In this report, we present an integrated safety evaluation of 7 frontier models: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, Qwen3-VL, Doubao 1.8, Grok 4.1 Fast, Nano Banana Pro, and Seedream 4.5. We evaluate each model across language, vision-language, and image generation settings using a unified protocol that integrates benchmark evaluation, adversarial evaluation, multilingual evaluation, and compliance evaluation. Aggregating our evaluations into safety leaderboards and model safety profiles across multiple evaluation modes reveals a sharply heterogeneous safety landscape. While GPT-5.2 demonstrates consistently strong and balanced safety performance across evaluations, other models exhibit pronounced trade-offs among benchmark safety, adversarial alignment, multilingual generalization, and regulatory compliance. Both language and vision-language modalities show significant vulnerability under adversarial evaluation, with all models degrading substantially despite strong results on standard benchmarks. Text-to-image models achieve relatively stronger alignment in regulated visual risk categories, yet remain brittle under adversarial or semantically ambiguous prompts. Overall, these results show that safety in frontier models is inherently multidimensional--shaped by modality, language, and evaluation scheme, underscoring the need for standardized safety evaluations to accurately assess real-world risk and guide responsible model development and deployment.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10527 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:52:52 +0000 - - - HeartMuLa: A Family of Open Sourced Music Foundation Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10547 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10547.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Dongchao Yang, Yuxin Xie, Yuguo Yin, Zheyu Wang, Xiaoyu Yi, Gongxi Zhu, Xiaolong Weng, Zihan Xiong, Yingzhe Ma, Dading Cong, Jingliang Liu, Zihang Huang, Jinghan Ru, Rongjie Huang, Haoran Wan, Peixu Wang, Kuoxi Yu, Helin Wang, Liming Liang, Xianwei Zhuang, Yuanyuan Wang, Haohan Guo, Junjie Cao, Zeqian Ju, Songxiang Liu, Yuewen Cao, Heming Weng, Yuexian Zou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 17</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present a family of open-source Music Foundation Models designed to advance large-scale music understanding and generation across diverse tasks and modalities. Our framework consists of four major components: (1) HeartCLAP, an audio-text alignment model; (2) HeartTranscriptor, a robust lyric recognition model optimized for real-world music scenarios; and (3) HeartCodec, a low-frame-rate (12.5 Hz) yet high-fidelity music codec tokenizer that captures long-range musical structure while preserving fine-grained acoustic details and enabling efficient autoregressive modeling; (4) HeartMuLa, an LLM-based song generation model capable of synthesizing high-fidelity music under rich, user-controllable conditions (e.g., textual style descriptions, lyrics, and reference audio). In addition, it provides two specialized modes: (i) fine-grained musical attribute control, which allows users to specify the style of different song sections (e.g., intro, verse, chorus) using natural language prompts; and (ii) short, engaging music generation, which is suitable as background music for short videos. Lastly, HeartMuLa improves significantly when scaled to 7B parameters. For the first time, we show that a Suno-level, commercial-grade system can be reproduced using academic-scale data and GPU resources. We expect these foundation models to serve as strong baselines for future research and to facilitate practical applications in multimodal content production.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10547 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:14:25 +0000 - - - Inference-time Physics Alignment of Video Generative Models with Latent World Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10553 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10553.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jianhao Yuan, Xiaofeng Zhang, Felix Friedrich, Nicolas Beltran-Velez, Melissa Hall, Reyhane Askari-Hemmat, Xiaochuang Han, Nicolas Ballas, Michal Drozdzal, Adriana Romero-Soriano</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> State-of-the-art video generative models produce promising visual content yet often violate basic physics principles, limiting their utility. While some attribute this deficiency to insufficient physics understanding from pre-training, we find that the shortfall in physics plausibility also stems from suboptimal inference strategies. We therefore introduce WMReward and treat improving physics plausibility of video generation as an inference-time alignment problem. In particular, we leverage the strong physics prior of a latent world model (here, VJEPA-2) as a reward to search and steer multiple candidate denoising trajectories, enabling scaling test-time compute for better generation performance. Empirically, our approach substantially improves physics plausibility across image-conditioned, multiframe-conditioned, and text-conditioned generation settings, with validation from human preference study. Notably, in the ICCV 2025 Perception Test PhysicsIQ Challenge, we achieve a final score of 62.64%, winning first place and outperforming the previous state of the art by 7.42%. Our work demonstrates the viability of using latent world models to improve physics plausibility of video generation, beyond this specific instantiation or parameterization.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10553 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:18:00 +0000 - - - Action100M: A Large-scale Video Action Dataset - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10592 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10592.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Delong Chen, Tejaswi Kasarla, Yejin Bang, Mustafa Shukor, Willy Chung, Jade Yu, Allen Bolourchi, Theo Moutakanni, Pascale Fung</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Inferring physical actions from visual observations is a fundamental capability for advancing machine intelligence in the physical world. Achieving this requires large-scale, open-vocabulary video action datasets that span broad domains. We introduce Action100M, a large-scale dataset constructed from 1.2M Internet instructional videos (14.6 years of duration), yielding O(100 million) temporally localized segments with open-vocabulary action supervision and rich captions. Action100M is generated by a fully automated pipeline that (i) performs hierarchical temporal segmentation using V-JEPA 2 embeddings, (ii) produces multi-level frame and segment captions organized as a Tree-of-Captions, and (iii) aggregates evidence with a reasoning model (GPT-OSS-120B) under a multi-round Self-Refine procedure to output structured annotations (brief/detailed action, actor, brief/detailed caption). Training VL-JEPA on Action100M demonstrates consistent data-scaling improvements and strong zero-shot performance across diverse action recognition benchmarks, establishing Action100M as a new foundation for scalable research in video understanding and world modeling.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10592 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:02:27 +0000 - - - Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10611 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10611.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Christopher Clark, Jieyu Zhang, Zixian Ma, Jae Sung Park, Mohammadreza Salehi, Rohun Tripathi, Sangho Lee, Zhongzheng Ren, Chris Dongjoo Kim, Yinuo Yang, Vincent Shao, Yue Yang, Weikai Huang, Ziqi Gao, Taira Anderson, Jianrui Zhang, Jitesh Jain, George Stoica, Winson Han, Ali Farhadi, Ranjay Krishna</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 20</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Today's strongest video-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models either rely on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs, effectively distilling from them, or do not disclose their training data or recipe. As a result, the open-source community lacks the foundations needed to improve on the state-of-the-art video (and image) language models. Crucially, many downstream applications require more than just high-level video understanding; they require grounding -- either by pointing or by tracking in pixels. Even proprietary models lack this capability. We present Molmo2, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art among open-source models and demonstrate exceptional new capabilities in point-driven grounding in single image, multi-image, and video tasks. Our key contribution is a collection of 7 new video datasets and 2 multi-image datasets, including a dataset of highly detailed video captions for pre-training, a free-form video Q&A dataset for fine-tuning, a new object tracking dataset with complex queries, and an innovative new video pointing dataset, all collected without the use of closed VLMs. We also present a training recipe for this data utilizing an efficient packing and message-tree encoding scheme, and show bi-directional attention on vision tokens and a novel token-weight strategy improves performance. Our best-in-class 8B model outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models on short videos, counting, and captioning, and is competitive on long-videos. On video-grounding Molmo2 significantly outperforms existing open-weight models like Qwen3-VL (35.5 vs 29.6 accuracy on video counting) and surpasses proprietary models like Gemini 3 Pro on some tasks (38.4 vs 20.0 F1 on video pointing and 56.2 vs 41.1 J&F on video tracking).</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10611 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:27:44 +0000 - - - PACEvolve: Enabling Long-Horizon Progress-Aware Consistent Evolution - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10657 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10657.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Minghao Yan, Bo Peng, Benjamin Coleman, Ziqi Chen, Zhouhang Xie, Zhankui He, Noveen Sachdeva, Isabella Ye, Weili Wang, Chi Wang, Ed H. Chi, Wang-Cheng Kang, Derek Zhiyuan Cheng, Beidou Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 17</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful operators for evolutionary search, yet the design of efficient search scaffolds remains ad hoc. While promising, current LLM-in-the-loop systems lack a systematic approach to managing the evolutionary process. We identify three distinct failure modes: Context Pollution, where experiment history biases future candidate generation; Mode Collapse, where agents stagnate in local minima due to poor exploration-exploitation balance; and Weak Collaboration, where rigid crossover strategies fail to leverage parallel search trajectories effectively. We introduce Progress-Aware Consistent Evolution (PACEvolve), a framework designed to robustly govern the agent's context and search dynamics, to address these challenges. PACEvolve combines hierarchical context management (HCM) with pruning to address context pollution; momentum-based backtracking (MBB) to escape local minima; and a self-adaptive sampling policy that unifies backtracking and crossover for dynamic search coordination (CE), allowing agents to balance internal refinement with cross-trajectory collaboration. We demonstrate that PACEvolve provides a systematic path to consistent, long-horizon self-improvement, achieving state-of-the-art results on LLM-SR and KernelBench, while discovering solutions surpassing the record on Modded NanoGPT.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10657 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:25:23 +0000 - - - MatchTIR: Fine-Grained Supervision for Tool-Integrated Reasoning via Bipartite Matching - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10712 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10712.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Changle Qu, Sunhao Dai, Hengyi Cai, Jun Xu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) empowers large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks by interleaving reasoning steps with external tool interactions. However, existing reinforcement learning methods typically rely on outcome- or trajectory-level rewards, assigning uniform advantages to all steps within a trajectory. This coarse-grained credit assignment fails to distinguish effective tool calls from redundant or erroneous ones, particularly in long-horizon multi-turn scenarios. To address this, we propose MatchTIR, a framework that introduces fine-grained supervision via bipartite matching-based turn-level reward assignment and dual-level advantage estimation. Specifically, we formulate credit assignment as a bipartite matching problem between predicted and ground-truth traces, utilizing two assignment strategies to derive dense turn-level rewards. Furthermore, to balance local step precision with global task success, we introduce a dual-level advantage estimation scheme that integrates turn-level and trajectory-level signals, assigning distinct advantage values to individual interaction turns. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of MatchTIR. Notably, our 4B model surpasses the majority of 8B competitors, particularly in long-horizon and multi-turn tasks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/quchangle1/MatchTIR.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10712 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:59:23 +0000 - - - Alterbute: Editing Intrinsic Attributes of Objects in Images - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10714 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10714.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tal Reiss, Daniel Winter, Matan Cohen, Alex Rav-Acha, Yael Pritch, Ariel Shamir, Yedid Hoshen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 21</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce Alterbute, a diffusion-based method for editing an object's intrinsic attributes in an image. We allow changing color, texture, material, and even the shape of an object, while preserving its perceived identity and scene context. Existing approaches either rely on unsupervised priors that often fail to preserve identity or use overly restrictive supervision that prevents meaningful intrinsic variations. Our method relies on: (i) a relaxed training objective that allows the model to change both intrinsic and extrinsic attributes conditioned on an identity reference image, a textual prompt describing the target intrinsic attributes, and a background image and object mask defining the extrinsic context. At inference, we restrict extrinsic changes by reusing the original background and object mask, thereby ensuring that only the desired intrinsic attributes are altered; (ii) Visual Named Entities (VNEs) - fine-grained visual identity categories (e.g., ''Porsche 911 Carrera'') that group objects sharing identity-defining features while allowing variation in intrinsic attributes. We use a vision-language model to automatically extract VNE labels and intrinsic attribute descriptions from a large public image dataset, enabling scalable, identity-preserving supervision. Alterbute outperforms existing methods on identity-preserving object intrinsic attribute editing.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10714 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:59:53 +0000 - - - WildRayZer: Self-supervised Large View Synthesis in Dynamic Environments - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10716 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.10716.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xuweiyi Chen, Wentao Zhou, Zezhou Cheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present WildRayZer, a self-supervised framework for novel view synthesis (NVS) in dynamic environments where both the camera and objects move. Dynamic content breaks the multi-view consistency that static NVS models rely on, leading to ghosting, hallucinated geometry, and unstable pose estimation. WildRayZer addresses this by performing an analysis-by-synthesis test: a camera-only static renderer explains rigid structure, and its residuals reveal transient regions. From these residuals, we construct pseudo motion masks, distill a motion estimator, and use it to mask input tokens and gate loss gradients so supervision focuses on cross-view background completion. To enable large-scale training and evaluation, we curate Dynamic RealEstate10K (D-RE10K), a real-world dataset of 15K casually captured dynamic sequences, and D-RE10K-iPhone, a paired transient and clean benchmark for sparse-view transient-aware NVS. Experiments show that WildRayZer consistently outperforms optimization-based and feed-forward baselines in both transient-region removal and full-frame NVS quality with a single feed-forward pass.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10716 - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:59:58 +0000 + Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11516 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2601.11516.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> János Kramár, Joshua Engels, Zheng Wang, Bilal Chughtai, Rohin Shah, Neel Nanda, Arthur Conmy</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Frontier language model capabilities are improving rapidly. We thus need stronger mitigations against bad actors misusing increasingly powerful systems. Prior work has shown that activation probes may be a promising misuse mitigation technique, but we identify a key remaining challenge: probes fail to generalize under important production distribution shifts. In particular, we find that the shift from short-context to long-context inputs is difficult for existing probe architectures. We propose several new probe architecture that handle this long-context distribution shift. We evaluate these probes in the cyber-offensive domain, testing their robustness against various production-relevant shifts, including multi-turn conversations, static jailbreaks, and adaptive red teaming. Our results demonstrate that while multimax addresses context length, a combination of architecture choice and training on diverse distributions is required for broad generalization. Additionally, we show that pairing probes with prompted classifiers achieves optimal accuracy at a low cost due to the computational efficiency of probes. These findings have informed the successful deployment of misuse mitigation probes in user-facing instances of Gemini, Google's frontier language model. Finally, we find early positive results using AlphaEvolve to automate improvements in both probe architecture search and adaptive red teaming, showing that automating some AI safety research is already possible.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11516 + Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:54:29 +0000