diff --git a/feed_weekly.xml b/feed_weekly.xml index 0b5cc81..ff7a87b 100644 --- a/feed_weekly.xml +++ b/feed_weekly.xml @@ -7,650 +7,713 @@ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification python-feedgen en - Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:11:52 +0000 + Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:11:59 +0000 - Mechanistic interpretability for steering vision-language-action models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00328 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.00328.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Bear Häon, Kaylene Stocking, Ian Chuang, Claire Tomlin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising path to realizing generalist embodied agents that can quickly adapt to new tasks, modalities, and environments. However, methods for interpreting and steering VLAs fall far short of classical robotics pipelines, which are grounded in explicit models of kinematics, dynamics, and control. This lack of mechanistic insight is a central challenge for deploying learned policies in real-world robotics, where robustness and explainability are critical. Motivated by advances in mechanistic interpretability for large language models, we introduce the first framework for interpreting and steering VLAs via their internal representations, enabling direct intervention in model behavior at inference time. We project feedforward activations within transformer layers onto the token embedding basis, identifying sparse semantic directions - such as speed and direction - that are causally linked to action selection. Leveraging these findings, we introduce a general-purpose activation steering method that modulates behavior in real time, without fine-tuning, reward signals, or environment interaction. We evaluate this method on two recent open-source VLAs, Pi0 and OpenVLA, and demonstrate zero-shot behavioral control in simulation (LIBERO) and on a physical robot (UR5). This work demonstrates that interpretable components of embodied VLAs can be systematically harnessed for control - establishing a new paradigm for transparent and steerable foundation models in robotics.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00328 - Sat, 30 Aug 2025 03:01:57 +0000 + MedReseacher-R1: Expert-Level Medical Deep Researcher via A Knowledge-Informed Trajectory Synthesis Framework + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14880 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14880.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ailing Yu, Lan Yao, Jingnan Liu, Zhe Chen, Jiajun Yin, Yuan Wang, Xinhao Liao, Zhiling Ye, Ji Li, Yun Yue, Hansong Xiao, Hualei Zhou, Chunxiao Guo, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent developments in Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have shown impressive capabilities spanning multiple domains, exemplified by deep research systems that demonstrate superior performance on complex information-seeking and synthesis tasks. While general-purpose deep research agents have shown impressive capabilities, they struggle significantly with medical domain challenges, as evidenced by leading proprietary systems achieving limited accuracy on complex medical benchmarks. The key limitations are: (1) the model lacks sufficient dense medical knowledge for clinical reasoning, and (2) the framework is constrained by the absence of specialized retrieval tools tailored for medical contexts.We present a medical deep research agent that addresses these challenges through two core innovations. First, we develop a novel data synthesis framework using medical knowledge graphs, extracting the longest chains from subgraphs around rare medical entities to generate complex multi-hop question-answer pairs. Second, we integrate a custom-built private medical retrieval engine alongside general-purpose tools, enabling accurate medical information synthesis. Our approach generates 2100+ diverse trajectories across 12 medical specialties, each averaging 4.2 tool interactions.Through a two-stage training paradigm combining supervised fine-tuning and online reinforcement learning with composite rewards, our MedResearcher-R1-32B model demonstrates exceptional performance, establishing new state-of-the-art results on medical benchmarks while maintaining competitive performance on general deep research tasks. Our work demonstrates that strategic domain-specific innovations in architecture, tool design, and training data construction can enable smaller open-source models to outperform much larger proprietary systems in specialized domains.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14880 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 17:51:20 +0000 - Q-Sched: Pushing the Boundaries of Few-Step Diffusion Models with Quantization-Aware Scheduling - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01624 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.01624.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Natalia Frumkin, Diana Marculescu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Text-to-image diffusion models are computationally intensive, often requiring dozens of forward passes through large transformer backbones. For instance, Stable Diffusion XL generates high-quality images with 50 evaluations of a 2.6B-parameter model, an expensive process even for a single batch. Few-step diffusion models reduce this cost to 2-8 denoising steps but still depend on large, uncompressed U-Net or diffusion transformer backbones, which are often too costly for full-precision inference without datacenter GPUs. These requirements also limit existing post-training quantization methods that rely on full-precision calibration. We introduce Q-Sched, a new paradigm for post-training quantization that modifies the diffusion model scheduler rather than model weights. By adjusting the few-step sampling trajectory, Q-Sched achieves full-precision accuracy with a 4x reduction in model size. To learn quantization-aware pre-conditioning coefficients, we propose the JAQ loss, which combines text-image compatibility with an image quality metric for fine-grained optimization. JAQ is reference-free and requires only a handful of calibration prompts, avoiding full-precision inference during calibration. Q-Sched delivers substantial gains: a 15.5% FID improvement over the FP16 4-step Latent Consistency Model and a 16.6% improvement over the FP16 8-step Phased Consistency Model, showing that quantization and few-step distillation are complementary for high-fidelity generation. A large-scale user study with more than 80,000 annotations further confirms Q-Sched's effectiveness on both FLUX.1[schnell] and SDXL-Turbo.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01624 - Mon, 01 Sep 2025 17:09:22 +0000 + CAT: Causal Attention Tuning For Injecting Fine-grained Causal Knowledge into Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01535 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.01535.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kairong Han, Wenshuo Zhao, Ziyu Zhao, JunJian Ye, Lujia Pan, Kun Kuang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, a fundamental question remains: Can LLMs effectively utilize causal knowledge for prediction and generation? Through empirical studies, we find that LLMs trained directly on large-scale data often capture spurious correlations rather than true causal relationships, leading to suboptimal performance, especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose Causal Attention Tuning (CAT), a novel approach that injects fine-grained causal knowledge into the attention mechanism. We propose an automated pipeline that leverages human priors to automatically generate token-level causal signals and introduce the Re-Attention mechanism to guide training, helping the model focus on causal structures while mitigating noise and biases in attention scores. Experimental results on our proposed Spurious Token Game (STG) benchmark and multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach effectively leverages causal knowledge for prediction and remains robust in OOD scenarios. Implementation details can be found at https://github.com/Kairong-Han/CAT.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01535 + Mon, 01 Sep 2025 15:13:15 +0000 - Reinforced Visual Perception with Tools - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01656 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.01656.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zetong Zhou, Dongping Chen, Zixian Ma, Zhihan Hu, Mingyang Fu, Sinan Wang, Yao Wan, Zhou Zhao, Ranjay Krishna</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 29</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Visual reasoning, a cornerstone of human intelligence, encompasses complex perceptual and logical processes essential for solving diverse visual problems. While advances in computer vision have produced powerful models for various perceptual tasks, leveraging these for general visual reasoning remains challenging. Prior work demonstrates that augmenting LLMs with vision models via supervised finetuning improves performance, but faces key limitations such as expensive data generation, reliance on careful data filtering, and poor generalization. To address these issues, we propose ReVPT to enhance multi-modal LLMs' abilities to reason about and use visual tools through reinforcement learning. We introduce a novel RL algorithm based on GRPO, designed to train models to reason with a suite of four visual tools. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several perception-heavy benchmarks, including SAT, CV-Bench, BLINK and MMStar, significantly outperforming the supervised and text-based RL finetuning baselines. Notably, Our ReVPT-3B and ReVPT-7B outperform the instruct models by 9.03% and 9.44% on CV-Bench. Finally, we bring to the community new insights on RL-based visual tool-usage through extensive ablations. Our code is available at https://github.com/ls-kelvin/REVPT.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01656 - Mon, 01 Sep 2025 17:57:49 +0000 + Context Engineering for Trustworthiness: Rescorla Wagner Steering Under Mixed and Inappropriate Contexts + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04500 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04500.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian, Yifan Shen, Yanzhou Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Ahmed Abbasi, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Incorporating external context can significantly enhance the response quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, real-world contexts often mix relevant information with disproportionate inappropriate content, posing reliability risks. How do LLMs process and prioritize mixed context? To study this, we introduce the Poisoned Context Testbed, pairing queries with real-world contexts containing relevant and inappropriate content. Inspired by associative learning in animals, we adapt the Rescorla-Wagner (RW) model from neuroscience to quantify how competing contextual signals influence LLM outputs. Our adapted model reveals a consistent behavioral pattern: LLMs exhibit a strong tendency to incorporate information that is less prevalent in the context. This susceptibility is harmful in real-world settings, where small amounts of inappropriate content can substantially degrade response quality. Empirical evaluations on our testbed further confirm this vulnerability. To tackle this, we introduce RW-Steering, a two-stage finetuning-based approach that enables the model to internally identify and ignore inappropriate signals. Unlike prior methods that rely on extensive supervision across diverse context mixtures, RW-Steering generalizes robustly across varying proportions of inappropriate content. Experiments show that our best fine-tuned model improves response quality by 39.8% and reverses the undesirable behavior curve, establishing RW-Steering as a robust, generalizable context engineering solution for improving LLM safety in real-world use.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04500 + Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:40:34 +0000 - 2D Gaussian Splatting with Semantic Alignment for Image Inpainting - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01964 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.01964.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hongyu Li, Chaofeng Chen, Xiaoming Li, Guangming Lu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Gaussian Splatting (GS), a recent technique for converting discrete points into continuous spatial representations, has shown promising results in 3D scene modeling and 2D image super-resolution. In this paper, we explore its untapped potential for image inpainting, which demands both locally coherent pixel synthesis and globally consistent semantic restoration. We propose the first image inpainting framework based on 2D Gaussian Splatting, which encodes incomplete images into a continuous field of 2D Gaussian splat coefficients and reconstructs the final image via a differentiable rasterization process. The continuous rendering paradigm of GS inherently promotes pixel-level coherence in the inpainted results. To improve efficiency and scalability, we introduce a patch-wise rasterization strategy that reduces memory overhead and accelerates inference. For global semantic consistency, we incorporate features from a pretrained DINO model. We observe that DINO's global features are naturally robust to small missing regions and can be effectively adapted to guide semantic alignment in large-mask scenarios, ensuring that the inpainted content remains contextually consistent with the surrounding scene. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance in both quantitative metrics and perceptual quality, establishing a new direction for applying Gaussian Splatting to 2D image processing.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01964 - Tue, 02 Sep 2025 05:12:52 +0000 + FLOWER: Democratizing Generalist Robot Policies with Efficient Vision-Language-Action Flow Policies + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04996 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04996.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Moritz Reuss, Hongyi Zhou, Marcel Rühle, Ömer Erdinç Yağmurlu, Fabian Otto, Rudolf Lioutikov</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Developing efficient Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies is crucial for practical robotics deployment, yet current approaches face prohibitive computational costs and resource requirements. Existing diffusion-based VLA policies require multi-billion-parameter models and massive datasets to achieve strong performance. We tackle this efficiency challenge with two contributions: intermediate-modality fusion, which reallocates capacity to the diffusion head by pruning up to 50% of LLM layers, and action-specific Global-AdaLN conditioning, which cuts parameters by 20% through modular adaptation. We integrate these advances into a novel 950 M-parameter VLA called FLOWER. Pretrained in just 200 H100 GPU hours, FLOWER delivers competitive performance with bigger VLAs across 190 tasks spanning ten simulation and real-world benchmarks and demonstrates robustness across diverse robotic embodiments. In addition, FLOWER achieves a new SoTA of 4.53 on the CALVIN ABC benchmark. Demos, code and pretrained weights are available at https://intuitive-robots.github.io/flower_vla/.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04996 + Fri, 05 Sep 2025 10:43:12 +0000 - Behavioral Fingerprinting of Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04504 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04504.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zehua Pei, Hui-Ling Zhen, Ying Zhang, Zhiyuan Yang, Xing Li, Xianzhi Yu, Mingxuan Yuan, Bei Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Current benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily focus on performance metrics, often failing to capture the nuanced behavioral characteristics that differentiate them. This paper introduces a novel ``Behavioral Fingerprinting'' framework designed to move beyond traditional evaluation by creating a multi-faceted profile of a model's intrinsic cognitive and interactive styles. Using a curated Diagnostic Prompt Suite and an innovative, automated evaluation pipeline where a powerful LLM acts as an impartial judge, we analyze eighteen models across capability tiers. Our results reveal a critical divergence in the LLM landscape: while core capabilities like abstract and causal reasoning are converging among top models, alignment-related behaviors such as sycophancy and semantic robustness vary dramatically. We further document a cross-model default persona clustering (ISTJ/ESTJ) that likely reflects common alignment incentives. Taken together, this suggests that a model's interactive nature is not an emergent property of its scale or reasoning power, but a direct consequence of specific, and highly variable, developer alignment strategies. Our framework provides a reproducible and scalable methodology for uncovering these deep behavioral differences. Project: https://github.com/JarvisPei/Behavioral-Fingerprinting</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04504 - Tue, 02 Sep 2025 07:03:20 +0000 + Multimodal Reasoning for Science: Technical Report and 1st Place Solution to the ICML 2025 SeePhys Challenge + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06079 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06079.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hao Liang, Ruitao Wu, Bohan Zeng, Junbo Niu, Wentao Zhang, Bin Dong</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multimodal reasoning remains a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence. Despite substantial advances in text-based reasoning, even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-o3 struggle to maintain strong performance in multimodal scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce a caption-assisted reasoning framework that effectively bridges visual and textual modalities. Our approach achieved 1st place in the ICML 2025 AI for Math Workshop \& Challenge 2: SeePhys, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness. Furthermore, we validate its generalization on the MathVerse benchmark for geometric reasoning, demonstrating the versatility of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenDCAI/SciReasoner.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06079 + Sun, 07 Sep 2025 14:47:32 +0000 - DivMerge: A divergence-based model merging method for multi-tasking - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02108 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.02108.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Touayouch Brahim, Fosse Loïc, Damnati Géraldine, Lecorvé Gwénolé</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multi-task learning (MTL) is often achieved by merging datasets before fine-tuning, but the growing availability of fine-tuned models has led to new approaches such as model merging via task arithmetic. A major challenge in this setting is task interference, which worsens as the number of tasks increases. We propose a method that merges models trained on different tasks into a single model, maintaining strong performance across all tasks. Our approach leverages Jensen-Shannon divergence to guide the merging process without requiring additional labelled data, and automatically balances task importance. Unlike existing methods, our approach remains robust as the number of tasks grows and consistently outperforms prior work.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02108 - Tue, 02 Sep 2025 09:04:41 +0000 + Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06216 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06216.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ahmed E. Hassan, Hao Li, Dayi Lin, Bram Adams, Tse-Hsun Chen, Yutaro Kashiwa, Dong Qiu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Agentic Software Engineering (SE 3.0) represents a new era where intelligent agents are tasked not with simple code generation, but with achieving complex, goal-oriented SE objectives. To harness these new capabilities while ensuring trustworthiness, we must recognize a fundamental duality within the SE field in the Agentic SE era, comprising two symbiotic modalities: SE for Humans and SE for Agents. This duality demands a radical reimagining of the foundational pillars of SE (actors, processes, tools, and artifacts) which manifest differently across each modality. We propose two purpose-built workbenches to support this vision. The Agent Command Environment (ACE) serves as a command center where humans orchestrate and mentor agent teams, handling outputs such as Merge-Readiness Packs (MRPs) and Consultation Request Packs (CRPs). The Agent Execution Environment (AEE) is a digital workspace where agents perform tasks while invoking human expertise when facing ambiguity or complex trade-offs. This bi-directional partnership, which supports agent-initiated human callbacks and handovers, gives rise to new, structured engineering activities (i.e., processes) that redefine human-AI collaboration, elevating the practice from agentic coding to true agentic software engineering. This paper presents the Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) vision, outlining several of the foundational pillars for the future of SE. The paper culminates in a research roadmap that identifies a few key challenges and opportunities while briefly discussing the resulting impact of this future on SE education. Our goal is not to offer a definitive solution, but to provide a conceptual scaffold with structured vocabulary to catalyze a community-wide dialogue, pushing the SE community to think beyond its classic, human-centric tenets toward a disciplined, scalable, and trustworthy agentic future.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06216 + Sun, 07 Sep 2025 21:40:10 +0000 - U-ARM : Ultra low-cost general teleoperation interface for robot manipulation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02437 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.02437.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yanwen Zou, Zhaoye Zhou, Chenyang Shi, Zewei Ye, Junda Huang, Yan Ding, Bo Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We propose U-Arm, a low-cost and rapidly adaptable leader-follower teleoperation framework designed to interface with most of commercially available robotic arms. Our system supports teleoperation through three structurally distinct 3D-printed leader arms that share consistent control logic, enabling seamless compatibility with diverse commercial robot configurations. Compared with previous open-source leader-follower interfaces, we further optimized both the mechanical design and servo selection, achieving a bill of materials (BOM) cost of only \50.5 for the 6-DoF leader arm and 56.8 for the 7-DoF version. To enhance usability, we mitigate the common challenge in controlling redundant degrees of freedom by %engineering methods mechanical and control optimizations. Experimental results demonstrate that U-Arm achieves 39\% higher data collection efficiency and comparable task success rates across multiple manipulation scenarios compared with Joycon, another low-cost teleoperation interface. We have open-sourced all CAD models of three configs and also provided simulation support for validating teleoperation workflows. We also open-sourced real-world manipulation data collected with U-Arm. The project website is https://github.com/MINT-SJTU/LeRobot-Anything-U-Arm.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02437 - Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:39:38 +0000 + HANRAG: Heuristic Accurate Noise-resistant Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09713 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09713.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yue Shen, Yihan Jiao, Zhehao Tan, Jie Feng, Lianzhen Zhong, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach enhances question-answering systems and dialogue generation tasks by integrating information retrieval (IR) technologies with large language models (LLMs). This strategy, which retrieves information from external knowledge bases to bolster the response capabilities of generative models, has achieved certain successes. However, current RAG methods still face numerous challenges when dealing with multi-hop queries. For instance, some approaches overly rely on iterative retrieval, wasting too many retrieval steps on compound queries. Additionally, using the original complex query for retrieval may fail to capture content relevant to specific sub-queries, resulting in noisy retrieved content. If the noise is not managed, it can lead to the problem of noise accumulation. To address these issues, we introduce HANRAG, a novel heuristic-based framework designed to efficiently tackle problems of varying complexity. Driven by a powerful revelator, HANRAG routes queries, decomposes them into sub-queries, and filters noise from retrieved documents. This enhances the system's adaptability and noise resistance, making it highly capable of handling diverse queries. We compare the proposed framework against other leading industry methods across various benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our framework obtains superior performance in both single-hop and multi-hop question-answering tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09713 + Mon, 08 Sep 2025 06:22:38 +0000 - Easier Painting Than Thinking: Can Text-to-Image Models Set the Stage, but Not Direct the Play? - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03516 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.03516.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ouxiang Li, Yuan Wang, Xinting Hu, Huijuan Huang, Rui Chen, Jiarong Ou, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Fuli Feng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Text-to-image (T2I) generation aims to synthesize images from textual prompts, which jointly specify what must be shown and imply what can be inferred, thereby corresponding to two core capabilities: composition and reasoning. However, with the emerging advances of T2I models in reasoning beyond composition, existing benchmarks reveal clear limitations in providing comprehensive evaluations across and within these capabilities. Meanwhile, these advances also enable models to handle more complex prompts, whereas current benchmarks remain limited to low scene density and simplified one-to-one reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose T2I-CoReBench, a comprehensive and complex benchmark that evaluates both composition and reasoning capabilities of T2I models. To ensure comprehensiveness, we structure composition around scene graph elements (instance, attribute, and relation) and reasoning around the philosophical framework of inference (deductive, inductive, and abductive), formulating a 12-dimensional evaluation taxonomy. To increase complexity, driven by the inherent complexities of real-world scenarios, we curate each prompt with high compositional density for composition and multi-step inference for reasoning. We also pair each prompt with a checklist that specifies individual yes/no questions to assess each intended element independently to facilitate fine-grained and reliable evaluation. In statistics, our benchmark comprises 1,080 challenging prompts and around 13,500 checklist questions. Experiments across 27 current T2I models reveal that their composition capability still remains limited in complex high-density scenarios, while the reasoning capability lags even further behind as a critical bottleneck, with all models struggling to infer implicit elements from prompts. Our project page: https://t2i-corebench.github.io/.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03516 - Wed, 03 Sep 2025 17:58:12 +0000 + FSG-Net: Frequency-Spatial Synergistic Gated Network for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Change Detection + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06482 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06482.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhongxiang Xie, Shuangxi Miao, Yuhan Jiang, Zhewei Zhang, Jing Yao, Xuecao Li, Jianxi Huang, Pedram Ghamisi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Change detection from high-resolution remote sensing images lies as a cornerstone of Earth observation applications, yet its efficacy is often compromised by two critical challenges. First, false alarms are prevalent as models misinterpret radiometric variations from temporal shifts (e.g., illumination, season) as genuine changes. Second, a non-negligible semantic gap between deep abstract features and shallow detail-rich features tends to obstruct their effective fusion, culminating in poorly delineated boundaries. To step further in addressing these issues, we propose the Frequency-Spatial Synergistic Gated Network (FSG-Net), a novel paradigm that aims to systematically disentangle semantic changes from nuisance variations. Specifically, FSG-Net first operates in the frequency domain, where a Discrepancy-Aware Wavelet Interaction Module (DAWIM) adaptively mitigates pseudo-changes by discerningly processing different frequency components. Subsequently, the refined features are enhanced in the spatial domain by a Synergistic Temporal-Spatial Attention Module (STSAM), which amplifies the saliency of genuine change regions. To finally bridge the semantic gap, a Lightweight Gated Fusion Unit (LGFU) leverages high-level semantics to selectively gate and integrate crucial details from shallow layers. Comprehensive experiments on the CDD, GZ-CD, and LEVIR-CD benchmarks validate the superiority of FSG-Net, establishing a new state-of-the-art with F1-scores of 94.16%, 89.51%, and 91.27%, respectively. The code will be made available at https://github.com/zxXie-Air/FSG-Net after a possible publication.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06482 + Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:46:33 +0000 - Emergent Hierarchical Reasoning in LLMs through Reinforcement Learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03646 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.03646.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haozhe Wang, Qixin Xu, Che Liu, Junhong Wu, Fangzhen Lin, Wenhu Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective at enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet underlying mechanisms driving this success remain largely opaque. Our analysis reveals that puzzling phenomena like ``aha moments", ``length-scaling'' and entropy dynamics are not disparate occurrences but hallmarks of an emergent reasoning hierarchy, akin to the separation of high-level strategic planning from low-level procedural execution in human cognition. We uncover a compelling two-phase dynamic: initially, a model is constrained by procedural correctness and must improve its low-level skills. The learning bottleneck then decisively shifts, with performance gains being driven by the exploration and mastery of high-level strategic planning. This insight exposes a core inefficiency in prevailing RL algorithms like GRPO, which apply optimization pressure agnostically and dilute the learning signal across all tokens. To address this, we propose HIerarchy-Aware Credit Assignment (HICRA), an algorithm that concentrates optimization efforts on high-impact planning tokens. HICRA significantly outperforms strong baselines, demonstrating that focusing on this strategic bottleneck is key to unlocking advanced reasoning. Furthermore, we validate semantic entropy as a superior compass for measuring strategic exploration over misleading metrics such as token-level entropy.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03646 - Wed, 03 Sep 2025 18:52:49 +0000 + IntrEx: A Dataset for Modeling Engagement in Educational Conversations + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06652 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06652.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xingwei Tan, Mahathi Parvatham, Chiara Gambi, Gabriele Pergola</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Engagement and motivation are crucial for second-language acquisition, yet maintaining learner interest in educational conversations remains a challenge. While prior research has explored what makes educational texts interesting, still little is known about the linguistic features that drive engagement in conversations. To address this gap, we introduce IntrEx, the first large dataset annotated for interestingness and expected interestingness in teacher-student interactions. Built upon the Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus (TSCC), IntrEx extends prior work by incorporating sequence-level annotations, allowing for the study of engagement beyond isolated turns to capture how interest evolves over extended dialogues. We employ a rigorous annotation process with over 100 second-language learners, using a comparison-based rating approach inspired by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to improve agreement. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can predict human interestingness judgments. We find that LLMs (7B/8B parameters) fine-tuned on interestingness ratings outperform larger proprietary models like GPT-4o, demonstrating the potential for specialised datasets to model engagement in educational settings. Finally, we analyze how linguistic and cognitive factors, such as concreteness, comprehensibility (readability), and uptake, influence engagement in educational dialogues.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06652 + Mon, 08 Sep 2025 13:07:35 +0000 - LuxDiT: Lighting Estimation with Video Diffusion Transformer - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03680 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.03680.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ruofan Liang, Kai He, Zan Gojcic, Igor Gilitschenski, Sanja Fidler, Nandita Vijaykumar, Zian Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Estimating scene lighting from a single image or video remains a longstanding challenge in computer vision and graphics. Learning-based approaches are constrained by the scarcity of ground-truth HDR environment maps, which are expensive to capture and limited in diversity. While recent generative models offer strong priors for image synthesis, lighting estimation remains difficult due to its reliance on indirect visual cues, the need to infer global (non-local) context, and the recovery of high-dynamic-range outputs. We propose LuxDiT, a novel data-driven approach that fine-tunes a video diffusion transformer to generate HDR environment maps conditioned on visual input. Trained on a large synthetic dataset with diverse lighting conditions, our model learns to infer illumination from indirect visual cues and generalizes effectively to real-world scenes. To improve semantic alignment between the input and the predicted environment map, we introduce a low-rank adaptation finetuning strategy using a collected dataset of HDR panoramas. Our method produces accurate lighting predictions with realistic angular high-frequency details, outperforming existing state-of-the-art techniques in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03680 - Wed, 03 Sep 2025 19:59:20 +0000 + LongEmotion: Measuring Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models in Long-Context Interaction + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07403 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07403.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weichu Liu, Jing Xiong, Yuxuan Hu, Zixuan Li, Minghuan Tan, Ningning Mao, Chenyang Zhao, Zhongwei Wan, Chaofan Tao, Wendong Xu, Hui Shen, Chengming Li, Lingpeng Kong, Ngai Wong</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) make significant progress in Emotional Intelligence (EI) and long-context understanding. However, existing benchmarks tend to overlook certain aspects of EI in long-context scenarios, especially under realistic, practical settings where interactions are lengthy, diverse, and often noisy. To move towards such realistic settings, we present LongEmotion, a benchmark specifically designed for long-context EI tasks. It covers a diverse set of tasks, including Emotion Classification, Emotion Detection, Emotion QA, Emotion Conversation, Emotion Summary, and Emotion Expression. On average, the input length for these tasks reaches 8,777 tokens, with long-form generation required for Emotion Expression. To enhance performance under realistic constraints, we incorporate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Collaborative Emotional Modeling (CoEM), and compare them with standard prompt-based methods. Unlike conventional approaches, our RAG method leverages both the conversation context and the large language model itself as retrieval sources, avoiding reliance on external knowledge bases. The CoEM method further improves performance by decomposing the task into five stages, integrating both retrieval augmentation and limited knowledge injection. Experimental results show that both RAG and CoEM consistently enhance EI-related performance across most long-context tasks, advancing LLMs toward more practical and real-world EI applications. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative case study experiment on the GPT series to demonstrate the differences among various models in terms of EI. Code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/LongEmotion/LongEmotion, and the project page can be found at https://longemotion.github.io/.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07403 + Tue, 09 Sep 2025 05:32:45 +0000 - Singular Value Few-shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03740 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.03740.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Taha Koleilat, Hassan Rivaz, Yiming Xiao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown impressive zero-shot and few-shot learning capabilities across diverse applications. However, adapting these models to new fine-grained domains remains difficult due to reliance on prompt engineering and the high cost of full model fine-tuning. Existing adaptation approaches rely on augmented components, such as prompt tokens and adapter modules, which could limit adaptation quality, destabilize the model, and compromise the rich knowledge learned during pretraining. In this work, we present CLIP-SVD, a novel multi-modal and parameter-efficient adaptation technique that leverages Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to modify the internal parameter space of CLIP without injecting additional modules. Specifically, we fine-tune only the singular values of the CLIP parameter matrices to rescale the basis vectors for domain adaptation while retaining the pretrained model. This design enables enhanced adaptation performance using only 0.04\% of the model's total parameters and better preservation of its generalization ability. CLIP-SVD achieves state-of-the-art classification results on 11 natural and 10 biomedical datasets, outperforming previous methods in both accuracy and generalization under few-shot settings. Additionally, we leverage a natural language-based approach to analyze the effectiveness and dynamics of the CLIP adaptation to allow interpretability of CLIP-SVD. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/CLIP-SVD.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03740 - Wed, 03 Sep 2025 22:00:23 +0000 + VStyle: A Benchmark for Voice Style Adaptation with Spoken Instructions + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09716 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09716.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jun Zhan, Mingyang Han, Yuxuan Xie, Chen Wang, Dong Zhang, Kexin Huang, Haoxiang Shi, DongXiao Wang, Tengtao Song, Qinyuan Cheng, Shimin Li, Jun Song, Xipeng Qiu, Bo Zheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Spoken language models (SLMs) have emerged as a unified paradigm for speech understanding and generation, enabling natural human machine interaction. However, while most progress has focused on semantic accuracy and instruction following, the ability of SLMs to adapt their speaking style based on spoken instructions has received limited attention. We introduce Voice Style Adaptation (VSA), a new task that examines whether SLMs can modify their speaking style, such as timbre, prosody, or persona following natural language spoken commands. To study this task, we present VStyle, a bilingual (Chinese & English) benchmark covering four categories of speech generation: acoustic attributes, natural language instruction, role play, and implicit empathy. We also introduce the Large Audio Language Model as a Judge (LALM as a Judge) framework, which progressively evaluates outputs along textual faithfulness, style adherence, and naturalness, ensuring reproducible and objective assessment. Experiments on commercial systems and open source SLMs demonstrate that current models face clear limitations in controllable style adaptation, highlighting both the novelty and challenge of this task. By releasing VStyle and its evaluation toolkit, we aim to provide the community with a foundation for advancing human centered spoken interaction. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://junzhan2000.github.io/VStyle.github.io/{project's homepage}.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09716 + Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:28:58 +0000 - MedVista3D: Vision-Language Modeling for Reducing Diagnostic Errors in 3D CT Disease Detection, Understanding and Reporting - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03800 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.03800.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuheng Li, Yenho Chen, Yuxiang Lai, Jike Zhong, Vanessa Wildman, Xiaofeng Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Radiologic diagnostic errors-under-reading errors, inattentional blindness, and communication failures-remain prevalent in clinical practice. These issues often stem from missed localized abnormalities, limited global context, and variability in report language. These challenges are amplified in 3D imaging, where clinicians must examine hundreds of slices per scan. Addressing them requires systems with precise localized detection, global volume-level reasoning, and semantically consistent natural language reporting. However, existing 3D vision-language models are unable to meet all three needs jointly, lacking local-global understanding for spatial reasoning and struggling with the variability and noise of uncurated radiology reports. We present MedVista3D, a multi-scale semantic-enriched vision-language pretraining framework for 3D CT analysis. To enable joint disease detection and holistic interpretation, MedVista3D performs local and global image-text alignment for fine-grained representation learning within full-volume context. To address report variability, we apply language model rewrites and introduce a Radiology Semantic Matching Bank for semantics-aware alignment. MedVista3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot disease classification, report retrieval, and medical visual question answering, while transferring well to organ segmentation and prognosis prediction. Code and datasets will be released.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03800 - Thu, 04 Sep 2025 01:28:44 +0000 + Visual-TableQA: Open-Domain Benchmark for Reasoning over Table Images + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07966 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07966.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Boammani Aser Lompo, Marc Haraoui</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Visual reasoning over structured data such as tables is a critical capability for modern vision-language models (VLMs), yet current benchmarks remain limited in scale, diversity, or reasoning depth, especially when it comes to rendered table images. Addressing this gap, we introduce Visual-TableQA, a large-scale, open-domain multimodal dataset specifically designed to evaluate and enhance visual reasoning over complex tabular data. Our generation pipeline is modular, scalable, and fully autonomous, involving multiple reasoning LLMs collaborating across distinct roles: generation, validation, and inspiration. Visual-TableQA comprises 2.5k richly structured LaTeX-rendered tables and 6k reasoning-intensive QA pairs, all produced at a cost of under USD 100. To promote diversity and creativity, our pipeline performs multi-model collaborative data generation via cross-model prompting ('inspiration') and LLM-jury filtering. Stronger models seed layouts and topics that weaker models elaborate, collectively distilling diverse reasoning patterns and visual structures into the dataset. Empirical results show that models fine-tuned on Visual-TableQA generalize robustly to external benchmarks, outperforming several proprietary models despite the dataset's synthetic nature. The full pipeline and resources are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-4-Everyone/Visual-TableQA.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07966 + Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:52:26 +0000 - On Robustness and Reliability of Benchmark-Based Evaluation of LLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04013 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04013.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Riccardo Lunardi, Vincenzo Della Mea, Stefano Mizzaro, Kevin Roitero</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) effectiveness is usually evaluated by means of benchmarks such as MMLU, ARC-C, or HellaSwag, where questions are presented in their original wording, thus in a fixed, standardized format. However, real-world applications involve linguistic variability, requiring models to maintain their effectiveness across diverse rewordings of the same question or query. In this study, we systematically assess the robustness of LLMs to paraphrased benchmark questions and investigate whether benchmark-based evaluations provide a reliable measure of model capabilities. We systematically generate various paraphrases of all the questions across six different common benchmarks, and measure the resulting variations in effectiveness of 34 state-of-the-art LLMs, of different size and effectiveness. Our findings reveal that while LLM rankings remain relatively stable across paraphrased inputs, absolute effectiveness scores change, and decline significantly. This suggests that LLMs struggle with linguistic variability, raising concerns about their generalization abilities and evaluation methodologies. Furthermore, the observed performance drop challenges the reliability of benchmark-based evaluations, indicating that high benchmark scores may not fully capture a model's robustness to real-world input variations. We discuss the implications of these findings for LLM evaluation methodologies, emphasizing the need for robustness-aware benchmarks that better reflect practical deployment scenarios.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04013 - Thu, 04 Sep 2025 08:43:27 +0000 + Interpretable Physics Reasoning and Performance Taxonomy in Vision-Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08270 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08270.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pranav Pawar, Kavish Shah, Akshat Bhalani, Komal Kasat, Dev Mittal, Hadi Gala, Deepali Patil, Nikita Raichada, Monali Deshmukh</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 21</p><p><b>Summary:</b> As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) grow in sophistication, their ability to perform reasoning is coming under increasing supervision. While they excel at many tasks, their grasp of fundamental scientific principles, such as physics, remains an underexplored frontier. To reflect the advancements in these capabilities, we introduce a novel and accessible framework designed to rigorously evaluate VLMs on their understanding of 2D physics. Our framework features a pragmatic scenario generator that creates a diverse testbed of over 400 problems across four core domains: Projectile Motion, Collision Dynamics, Mechanics, and Fluid Dynamics. Through comprehensive evaluation of four state-of-the-art VLMs, we demonstrate a strong correlation between model scale and reasoning ability, with our top-performing model, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, achieving an overall score of 0.815. We find that while models excel at formulaic problems, they struggle significantly with domains requiring abstract spatial reasoning. By designing this framework, we aim to democratize the study of scientific reasoning in VLMs and foster deeper insights into their capabilities and limitations.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08270 + Wed, 10 Sep 2025 04:15:01 +0000 - Set Block Decoding is a Language Model Inference Accelerator - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04185 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04185.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Itai Gat, Heli Ben-Hamu, Marton Havasi, Daniel Haziza, Jeremy Reizenstein, Gabriel Synnaeve, David Lopez-Paz, Brian Karrer, Yaron Lipman</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 48</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Autoregressive next token prediction language models offer powerful capabilities but face significant challenges in practical deployment due to the high computational and memory costs of inference, particularly during the decoding stage. We introduce Set Block Decoding (SBD), a simple and flexible paradigm that accelerates generation by integrating standard next token prediction (NTP) and masked token prediction (MATP) within a single architecture. SBD allows the model to sample multiple, not necessarily consecutive, future tokens in parallel, a key distinction from previous acceleration methods. This flexibility allows the use of advanced solvers from the discrete diffusion literature, offering significant speedups without sacrificing accuracy. SBD requires no architectural changes or extra training hyperparameters, maintains compatibility with exact KV-caching, and can be implemented by fine-tuning existing next token prediction models. By fine-tuning Llama-3.1 8B and Qwen-3 8B, we demonstrate that SBD enables a 3-5x reduction in the number of forward passes required for generation while achieving same performance as equivalent NTP training.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04185 - Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:02:39 +0000 + MCP-AgentBench: Evaluating Real-World Language Agent Performance with MCP-Mediated Tools + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09734 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09734.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zikang Guo, Benfeng Xu, Chiwei Zhu, Wentao Hong, Xiaorui Wang, Zhendong Mao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly emerging as a pivotal open standard, designed to enhance agent-tool integration and interoperability, and is positioned to unlock a new era of powerful, interconnected, and genuinely utilitarian agentic AI. However, despite MCP's growing adoption, existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-world agent performance within this new paradigm, leading to a distorted perception of their true operational value and an inability to reliably differentiate proficiencies. To bridge this critical evaluation gap, we introduce MCP-AgentBench -- a comprehensive benchmark specifically engineered to rigorously assess language agent capabilities in MCP-mediated tool interactions. Core contributions of MCP-AgentBench include: the establishment of a robust MCP testbed comprising 33 operational servers with 188 distinct tools; the development of a benchmark featuring 600 systematically designed queries distributed across 6 distinct categories of varying interaction complexity; and the introduction of MCP-Eval, a novel outcome-oriented evaluation methodology prioritizing real-world task success. Through extensive empirical evaluation of leading language agents, we provide foundational insights. MCP-AgentBench aims to equip the research community with a standardized and reliable framework to build, validate, and advance agents capable of fully leveraging MCP's transformative benefits, thereby accelerating progress toward truly capable and interoperable AI systems.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09734 + Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:08:40 +0000 - 3D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07996 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07996.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lingdong Kong, Wesley Yang, Jianbiao Mei, Youquan Liu, Ao Liang, Dekai Zhu, Dongyue Lu, Wei Yin, Xiaotao Hu, Mingkai Jia, Junyuan Deng, Kaiwen Zhang, Yang Wu, Tianyi Yan, Shenyuan Gao, Song Wang, Linfeng Li, Liang Pan, Yong Liu, Jianke Zhu, Wei Tsang Ooi, Steven C. H. Hoi, Ziwei Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 50</p><p><b>Summary:</b> World modeling has become a cornerstone in AI research, enabling agents to understand, represent, and predict the dynamic environments they inhabit. While prior work largely emphasizes generative methods for 2D image and video data, they overlook the rapidly growing body of work that leverages native 3D and 4D representations such as RGB-D imagery, occupancy grids, and LiDAR point clouds for large-scale scene modeling. At the same time, the absence of a standardized definition and taxonomy for ``world models'' has led to fragmented and sometimes inconsistent claims in the literature. This survey addresses these gaps by presenting the first comprehensive review explicitly dedicated to 3D and 4D world modeling and generation. We establish precise definitions, introduce a structured taxonomy spanning video-based (VideoGen), occupancy-based (OccGen), and LiDAR-based (LiDARGen) approaches, and systematically summarize datasets and evaluation metrics tailored to 3D/4D settings. We further discuss practical applications, identify open challenges, and highlight promising research directions, aiming to provide a coherent and foundational reference for advancing the field. A systematic summary of existing literature is available at https://github.com/worldbench/survey</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07996 - Thu, 04 Sep 2025 17:59:58 +0000 + X-Part: high fidelity and structure coherent shape decomposition + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08643 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08643.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xinhao Yan, Jiachen Xu, Yang Li, Changfeng Ma, Yunhan Yang, Chunshi Wang, Zibo Zhao, Zeqiang Lai, Yunfei Zhao, Zhuo Chen, Chunchao Guo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Generating 3D shapes at part level is pivotal for downstream applications such as mesh retopology, UV mapping, and 3D printing. However, existing part-based generation methods often lack sufficient controllability and suffer from poor semantically meaningful decomposition. To this end, we introduce X-Part, a controllable generative model designed to decompose a holistic 3D object into semantically meaningful and structurally coherent parts with high geometric fidelity. X-Part exploits the bounding box as prompts for the part generation and injects point-wise semantic features for meaningful decomposition. Furthermore, we design an editable pipeline for interactive part generation. Extensive experimental results show that X-Part achieves state-of-the-art performance in part-level shape generation. This work establishes a new paradigm for creating production-ready, editable, and structurally sound 3D assets. Codes will be released for public research.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08643 + Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:37:02 +0000 - Bootstrapping Task Spaces for Self-Improvement - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04575 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04575.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Minqi Jiang, Andrei Lupu, Yoram Bachrach</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Progress in many task domains emerges from repeated revisions to previous solution attempts. Training agents that can reliably self-improve over such sequences at inference-time is a natural target for reinforcement learning (RL), yet the naive approach assumes a fixed maximum iteration depth, which can be both costly and arbitrary. We present Exploratory Iteration (ExIt), a family of autocurriculum RL methods that directly exploits the recurrent structure of self-improvement tasks to train LLMs to perform multi-step self-improvement at inference-time while only training on the most informative single-step iterations. ExIt grows a task space by selectively sampling the most informative intermediate, partial histories encountered during an episode for continued iteration, treating these starting points as new self-iteration task instances to train a self-improvement policy. ExIt can further pair with explicit exploration mechanisms to sustain greater task diversity. Across several domains, encompassing competition math, multi-turn tool-use, and machine learning engineering, we demonstrate that ExIt strategies, starting from either a single or many task instances, can produce policies exhibiting strong inference-time self-improvement on held-out task instances, and the ability to iterate towards higher performance over a step budget extending beyond the average iteration depth encountered during training.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04575 - Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:01:00 +0000 + Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08825 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08825.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Joachim Baumann, Paul Röttger, Aleksandra Urman, Albert Wendsjö, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Johannes B. Gruber, Dirk Hovy</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming social science research by enabling the automation of labor-intensive tasks like data annotation and text analysis. However, LLM outputs vary significantly depending on the implementation choices made by researchers (e.g., model selection, prompting strategy, or temperature settings). Such variation can introduce systematic biases and random errors, which propagate to downstream analyses and cause Type I, Type II, Type S, or Type M errors. We call this LLM hacking. We quantify the risk of LLM hacking by replicating 37 data annotation tasks from 21 published social science research studies with 18 different models. Analyzing 13 million LLM labels, we test 2,361 realistic hypotheses to measure how plausible researcher choices affect statistical conclusions. We find incorrect conclusions based on LLM-annotated data in approximately one in three hypotheses for state-of-the-art models, and in half the hypotheses for small language models. While our findings show that higher task performance and better general model capabilities reduce LLM hacking risk, even highly accurate models do not completely eliminate it. The risk of LLM hacking decreases as effect sizes increase, indicating the need for more rigorous verification of findings near significance thresholds. Our extensive analysis of LLM hacking mitigation techniques emphasizes the importance of human annotations in reducing false positive findings and improving model selection. Surprisingly, common regression estimator correction techniques are largely ineffective in reducing LLM hacking risk, as they heavily trade off Type I vs. Type II errors. Beyond accidental errors, we find that intentional LLM hacking is unacceptably simple. With few LLMs and just a handful of prompt paraphrases, anything can be presented as statistically significant.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08825 + Wed, 10 Sep 2025 17:58:53 +0000 - Inpaint4Drag: Repurposing Inpainting Models for Drag-Based Image Editing via Bidirectional Warping - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04582 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04582.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jingyi Lu, Kai Han</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Drag-based image editing has emerged as a powerful paradigm for intuitive image manipulation. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on manipulating the latent space of generative models, leading to limited precision, delayed feedback, and model-specific constraints. Accordingly, we present Inpaint4Drag, a novel framework that decomposes drag-based editing into pixel-space bidirectional warping and image inpainting. Inspired by elastic object deformation in the physical world, we treat image regions as deformable materials that maintain natural shape under user manipulation. Our method achieves real-time warping previews (0.01s) and efficient inpainting (0.3s) at 512x512 resolution, significantly improving the interaction experience compared to existing methods that require minutes per edit. By transforming drag inputs directly into standard inpainting formats, our approach serves as a universal adapter for any inpainting model without architecture modification, automatically inheriting all future improvements in inpainting technology. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior visual quality and precise control while maintaining real-time performance. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/inpaint4drag/</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04582 - Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:04:47 +0000 + World Modeling with Probabilistic Structure Integration + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09737 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09737.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Klemen Kotar, Wanhee Lee, Rahul Venkatesh, Honglin Chen, Daniel Bear, Jared Watrous, Simon Kim, Khai Loong Aw, Lilian Naing Chen, Stefan Stojanov, Kevin Feigelis, Imran Thobani, Alex Durango, Khaled Jedoui, Atlas Kazemian, Dan Yamins</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Probabilistic Structure Integration (PSI), a system for learning richly controllable and flexibly promptable world models from data. PSI consists of a three-step cycle. The first step, Probabilistic prediction, involves building a probabilistic graphical model Psi of the data, in the form of a random-access autoregressive sequence model. Psi supports a complete set of learned conditional distributions describing the dependence of any variables in the data on any other set of variables. In step 2, Structure extraction, we show how to extract underlying low-dimensional properties in the data, corresponding to a diverse set of meaningful "intermediate structures", in a zero-shot fashion via causal inference on Psi. Step 3, Integration, completes the cycle by converting these structures into new token types that are then continually mixed back into the training diet as conditioning signals and prediction targets. Each such cycle augments the capabilities of Psi, both allowing it to model the underlying data better, and creating new control handles -- akin to an LLM-like universal prompting language. We train an instance of Psi on 1.4 trillion tokens of internet video data; we use it to perform a variety of useful video prediction and understanding inferences; we extract state-of-the-art optical flow, self-supervised depth and object segmentation; and we use these structures to support a full cycle of predictive improvements.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09737 + Wed, 10 Sep 2025 18:01:04 +0000 - Why Language Models Hallucinate - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04664 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04664.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Adam Tauman Kalai, Ofir Nachum, Santosh S. Vempala, Edwin Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 157</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such "hallucinations" persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious -- they originate simply as errors in binary classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded -- language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This "epidemic" of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04664 - Thu, 04 Sep 2025 21:26:31 +0000 + Can Multimodal LLMs See Materials Clearly? A Multimodal Benchmark on Materials Characterization + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09307 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09307.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhengzhao Lai, Youbin Zheng, Zhenyang Cai, Haonan Lyu, Jinpu Yang, Hongqing Liang, Yan Hu, Benyou Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Materials characterization is fundamental to acquiring materials information, revealing the processing-microstructure-property relationships that guide material design and optimization. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown promise in generative and predictive tasks within materials science, their capacity to understand real-world characterization imaging data remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present MatCha, the first benchmark for materials characterization image understanding, comprising 1,500 questions that demand expert-level domain expertise. MatCha encompasses four key stages of materials research comprising 21 distinct tasks, each designed to reflect authentic challenges faced by materials scientists. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs on MatCha reveals a significant performance gap compared to human experts. These models exhibit degradation when addressing questions requiring higher-level expertise and sophisticated visual perception. Simple few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting struggle to alleviate these limitations. These findings highlight that existing MLLMs still exhibit limited adaptability to real-world materials characterization scenarios. We hope MatCha will facilitate future research in areas such as new material discovery and autonomous scientific agents. MatCha is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/MatCha.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09307 + Thu, 11 Sep 2025 09:50:16 +0000 - WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04744 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.04744.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Gagan Mundada, Yash Vishe, Amit Namburi, Xin Xu, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various vision-language tasks. However, their reasoning abilities in the multimodal symbolic music domain remain largely unexplored. We introduce WildScore, the first in-the-wild multimodal symbolic music reasoning and analysis benchmark, designed to evaluate MLLMs' capacity to interpret real-world music scores and answer complex musicological queries. Each instance in WildScore is sourced from genuine musical compositions and accompanied by authentic user-generated questions and discussions, capturing the intricacies of practical music analysis. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we propose a systematic taxonomy, comprising both high-level and fine-grained musicological ontologies. Furthermore, we frame complex music reasoning as multiple-choice question answering, enabling controlled and scalable assessment of MLLMs' symbolic music understanding. Empirical benchmarking of state-of-the-art MLLMs on WildScore reveals intriguing patterns in their visual-symbolic reasoning, uncovering both promising directions and persistent challenges for MLLMs in symbolic music reasoning and analysis. We release the dataset and code.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04744 - Fri, 05 Sep 2025 01:54:50 +0000 + DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025: Modeling Perspectives with In-Context Learning and Label Distribution Learning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09524 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09524.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Daniil Ignatev, Nan Li, Hugh Mee Wong, Anh Dang, Shane Kaszefski Yaschuk</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This system paper presents the DeMeVa team's approaches to the third edition of the Learning with Disagreements shared task (LeWiDi 2025; Leonardelli et al., 2025). We explore two directions: in-context learning (ICL) with large language models, where we compare example sampling strategies; and label distribution learning (LDL) methods with RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019b), where we evaluate several fine-tuning methods. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we show that ICL can effectively predict annotator-specific annotations (perspectivist annotations), and that aggregating these predictions into soft labels yields competitive performance; and (2) we argue that LDL methods are promising for soft label predictions and merit further exploration by the perspectivist community.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09524 + Thu, 11 Sep 2025 15:04:42 +0000 - Symbolic Graphics Programming with Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05208 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.05208.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yamei Chen, Haoquan Zhang, Yangyi Huang, Zeju Qiu, Kaipeng Zhang, Yandong Wen, Weiyang Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 44</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) excel at program synthesis, yet their ability to produce symbolic graphics programs (SGPs) that render into precise visual content remains underexplored. We study symbolic graphics programming, where the goal is to generate an SGP from a natural-language description. This task also serves as a lens into how LLMs understand the visual world by prompting them to generate images rendered from SGPs. Among various SGPs, our paper sticks to scalable vector graphics (SVGs). We begin by examining the extent to which LLMs can generate SGPs. To this end, we introduce SGP-GenBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering object fidelity, scene fidelity, and compositionality (attribute binding, spatial relations, numeracy). On SGP-GenBench, we discover that frontier proprietary models substantially outperform open-source models, and performance correlates well with general coding capabilities. Motivated by this gap, we aim to improve LLMs' ability to generate SGPs. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards approach, where a format-validity gate ensures renderable SVG, and a cross-modal reward aligns text and the rendered image via strong vision encoders (e.g., SigLIP for text-image and DINO for image-image). Applied to Qwen-2.5-7B, our method substantially improves SVG generation quality and semantics, achieving performance on par with frontier systems. We further analyze training dynamics, showing that RL induces (i) finer decomposition of objects into controllable primitives and (ii) contextual details that improve scene coherence. Our results demonstrate that symbolic graphics programming offers a precise and interpretable lens on cross-modal grounding.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05208 - Fri, 05 Sep 2025 16:10:53 +0000 + Measuring Epistemic Humility in Multimodal Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09658 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09658.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Bingkui Tong, Jiaer Xia, Sifeng Shang, Kaiyang Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Hallucinations in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) -- where the model generates content inconsistent with the input image -- pose significant risks in real-world applications, from misinformation in visual question answering to unsafe errors in decision-making. Existing benchmarks primarily test recognition accuracy, i.e., evaluating whether models can select the correct answer among distractors. This overlooks an equally critical capability for trustworthy AI: recognizing when none of the provided options are correct, a behavior reflecting epistemic humility. We present HumbleBench, a new hallucination benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs' ability to reject plausible but incorrect answers across three hallucination types: object, relation, and attribute. Built from a panoptic scene graph dataset, we leverage fine-grained scene graph annotations to extract ground-truth entities and relations, and prompt GPT-4-Turbo to generate multiple-choice questions, followed by a rigorous manual filtering process. Each question includes a "None of the above" option, requiring models not only to recognize correct visual information but also to identify when no provided answer is valid. We evaluate a variety of state-of-the-art MLLMs -- including both general-purpose and specialized reasoning models -- on HumbleBench and share valuable findings and insights with the community. By incorporating explicit false-option rejection, HumbleBench fills a key gap in current evaluation suites, providing a more realistic measure of MLLM reliability in safety-critical settings. Our code and dataset are released publicly and can be accessed at https://github.com/maifoundations/HumbleBench.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09658 + Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:54:00 +0000 - Hunyuan-MT Technical Report - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05209 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.05209.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mao Zheng, Zheng Li, Bingxin Qu, Mingyang Song, Yang Du, Mingrui Sun, Di Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In this report, we introduce Hunyuan-MT-7B, our first open-source multilingual translation model, which supports bidirectional translation across 33 major languages and places a special emphasis on translation between Mandarin and several ethnic minority languages as well as dialects. Furthermore, to serve and address diverse translation scenarios and enhance model performance at test time, we introduce Hunyuan-MT-Chimera-7B, a translation model inspired by the slow thinking mode. This model integrates multiple outputs generated by the Hunyuan-MT-7B model under varying parameter settings, thereby achieving performance superior to that of conventional slow-thinking models based on Chain-of-Thought (CoT). The development of our models follows a holistic training process specifically engineered for multilingual translation, which begins with general and MT-oriented pre-training to build foundational capabilities, proceeds to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for task-specific adaptation, and culminates in advanced alignment through Reinforcement Learning (RL) and weak-to-strong RL. Through comprehensive experimentation, we demonstrate that both Hunyuan-MT-7B and Hunyuan-MT-Chimera-7B significantly outperform all translation-specific models of comparable parameter size and most of the SOTA large models, particularly on the task of translation between Mandarin and minority languages as well as dialects. In the WMT2025 shared task (General Machine Translation), our models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, ranking first in 30 out of 31 language pairs. This result highlights the robustness of our models across a diverse linguistic spectrum, encompassing high-resource languages such as Chinese, English, and Japanese, as well as low-resource languages including Czech, Marathi, Estonian, and Icelandic.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05209 - Fri, 05 Sep 2025 16:11:05 +0000 + Locality in Image Diffusion Models Emerges from Data Statistics + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09672 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09672.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Artem Lukoianov, Chenyang Yuan, Justin Solomon, Vincent Sitzmann</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Among generative models, diffusion models are uniquely intriguing due to the existence of a closed-form optimal minimizer of their training objective, often referred to as the optimal denoiser. However, diffusion using this optimal denoiser merely reproduces images in the training set and hence fails to capture the behavior of deep diffusion models. Recent work has attempted to characterize this gap between the optimal denoiser and deep diffusion models, proposing analytical, training-free models that can generate images that resemble those generated by a trained UNet. The best-performing method hypothesizes that shift equivariance and locality inductive biases of convolutional neural networks are the cause of the performance gap, hence incorporating these assumptions into its analytical model. In this work, we present evidence that the locality in deep diffusion models emerges as a statistical property of the image dataset, not due to the inductive bias of convolutional neural networks. Specifically, we demonstrate that an optimal parametric linear denoiser exhibits similar locality properties to the deep neural denoisers. We further show, both theoretically and experimentally, that this locality arises directly from the pixel correlations present in natural image datasets. Finally, we use these insights to craft an analytical denoiser that better matches scores predicted by a deep diffusion model than the prior expert-crafted alternative.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09672 + Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:59:08 +0000 - LatticeWorld: A Multimodal Large Language Model-Empowered Framework for Interactive Complex World Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05263 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.05263.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yinglin Duan, Zhengxia Zou, Tongwei Gu, Wei Jia, Zhan Zhao, Luyi Xu, Xinzhu Liu, Hao Jiang, Kang Chen, Shuang Qiu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent research has been increasingly focusing on developing 3D world models that simulate complex real-world scenarios. World models have found broad applications across various domains, including embodied AI, autonomous driving, entertainment, etc. A more realistic simulation with accurate physics will effectively narrow the sim-to-real gap and allow us to gather rich information about the real world conveniently. While traditional manual modeling has enabled the creation of virtual 3D scenes, modern approaches have leveraged advanced machine learning algorithms for 3D world generation, with most recent advances focusing on generative methods that can create virtual worlds based on user instructions. This work explores such a research direction by proposing LatticeWorld, a simple yet effective 3D world generation framework that streamlines the industrial production pipeline of 3D environments. LatticeWorld leverages lightweight LLMs (LLaMA-2-7B) alongside the industry-grade rendering engine (e.g., Unreal Engine 5) to generate a dynamic environment. Our proposed framework accepts textual descriptions and visual instructions as multimodal inputs and creates large-scale 3D interactive worlds with dynamic agents, featuring competitive multi-agent interaction, high-fidelity physics simulation, and real-time rendering. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate LatticeWorld, showing that it achieves superior accuracy in scene layout generation and visual fidelity. Moreover, LatticeWorld achieves over a 90times increase in industrial production efficiency while maintaining high creative quality compared with traditional manual production methods. Our demo video is available at https://youtu.be/8VWZXpERR18</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05263 - Fri, 05 Sep 2025 17:22:33 +0000 + The Illusion of Diminishing Returns: Measuring Long Horizon Execution in LLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09677 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09677.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Akshit Sinha, Arvindh Arun, Shashwat Goel, Steffen Staab, Jonas Geiping</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 32</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Does continued scaling of large language models (LLMs) yield diminishing returns? Real-world value often stems from the length of task an agent can complete. We start this work by observing the simple but counterintuitive fact that marginal gains in single-step accuracy can compound into exponential improvements in the length of a task a model can successfully complete. Then, we argue that failures of LLMs when simple tasks are made longer arise from mistakes in execution, rather than an inability to reason. We propose isolating execution capability, by explicitly providing the knowledge and plan needed to solve a long-horizon task. We find that larger models can correctly execute significantly more turns even when small models have 100\% single-turn accuracy. We observe that the per-step accuracy of models degrades as the number of steps increases. This is not just due to long-context limitations -- curiously, we observe a self-conditioning effect -- models become more likely to make mistakes when the context contains their errors from prior turns. Self-conditioning does not reduce by just scaling the model size. In contrast, recent thinking models do not self-condition, and can also execute much longer tasks in a single turn. We conclude by benchmarking frontier thinking models on the length of task they can execute in a single turn. Overall, by focusing on the ability to execute, we hope to reconcile debates on how LLMs can solve complex reasoning problems yet fail at simple tasks when made longer, and highlight the massive benefits of scaling model size and sequential test-time compute for long-horizon tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09677 + Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:59:34 +0000 - WinT3R: Window-Based Streaming Reconstruction with Camera Token Pool - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05296 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.05296.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zizun Li, Jianjun Zhou, Yifan Wang, Haoyu Guo, Wenzheng Chang, Yang Zhou, Haoyi Zhu, Junyi Chen, Chunhua Shen, Tong He</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present WinT3R, a feed-forward reconstruction model capable of online prediction of precise camera poses and high-quality point maps. Previous methods suffer from a trade-off between reconstruction quality and real-time performance. To address this, we first introduce a sliding window mechanism that ensures sufficient information exchange among frames within the window, thereby improving the quality of geometric predictions without large computation. In addition, we leverage a compact representation of cameras and maintain a global camera token pool, which enhances the reliability of camera pose estimation without sacrificing efficiency. These designs enable WinT3R to achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of online reconstruction quality, camera pose estimation, and reconstruction speed, as validated by extensive experiments on diverse datasets. Code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/LiZizun/WinT3R.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05296 - Fri, 05 Sep 2025 17:59:47 +0000 + LoFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Long-tailed Semi-Supervised Learning in Open-World Scenarios + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09926 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09926.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiahao Chen, Zhiyuan Huang, Yurou Liu, Bing Su</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Long-tailed learning has garnered increasing attention due to its wide applicability in real-world scenarios. Among existing approaches, Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning (LTSSL) has emerged as an effective solution by incorporating a large amount of unlabeled data into the imbalanced labeled dataset. However, most prior LTSSL methods are designed to train models from scratch, which often leads to issues such as overconfidence and low-quality pseudo-labels. To address these challenges, we extend LTSSL into the foundation model fine-tuning paradigm and propose a novel framework: LoFT (Long-tailed semi-supervised learning via parameter-efficient Fine-Tuning). We demonstrate that fine-tuned foundation models can generate more reliable pseudolabels, thereby benefiting imbalanced learning. Furthermore, we explore a more practical setting by investigating semi-supervised learning under open-world conditions, where the unlabeled data may include out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. To handle this problem, we propose LoFT-OW (LoFT under Open-World scenarios) to improve the discriminative ability. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to previous approaches, even when utilizing only 1\% of the unlabeled data compared with previous works.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09926 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 02:28:32 +0000 - Llama-GENBA-10B: A Trilingual Large Language Model for German, English and Bavarian - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05668 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.05668.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Michael Hoffmann, Jophin John, Stefan Schweter, Gokul Ramakrishnan, Hoi-Fong Mak, Alice Zhang, Dmitry Gaynullin, Nicolay J. Hammer</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Llama-GENBA-10B, a trilingual foundation model addressing English-centric bias in large language models. Built on Llama 3.1-8B and scaled to 10B parameters, Llama-GENBA-10B is continuously pretrained on 164B tokens (82B English, 82B German, and 80M Bavarian), balancing resources while preventing English dominance. Targeted at the German NLP community, the model also promotes Bavarian as a low-resource language. Development tackled four challenges: (1) curating a multilingual corpus despite Bavarian scarcity, (2) creating a unified tokenizer for English, German, and Bavarian, (3) optimizing architecture and language-ratio hyperparameters for cross-lingual transfer, and (4) establishing the first standardized trilingual evaluation suite by translating German benchmarks into Bavarian. Evaluations show that Llama-GENBA-10B achieves strong cross-lingual performance, with the fine-tuned variant surpassing Apertus-8B-2509 and gemma-2-9b in Bavarian and establishing itself as the best model in its class for this language, while also outperforming EuroLLM in English and matching its results in German. Training on the Cerebras CS-2 demonstrated efficient large-scale multilingual pretraining with documented energy use, offering a blueprint for inclusive foundation models that integrate low-resource languages.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05668 - Sat, 06 Sep 2025 10:12:52 +0000 + CMHG: A Dataset and Benchmark for Headline Generation of Minority Languages in China + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09990 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09990.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Guixian Xu, Zeli Su, Ziyin Zhang, Jianing Liu, XU Han, Ting Zhang, Yushuang Dong</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Minority languages in China, such as Tibetan, Uyghur, and Traditional Mongolian, face significant challenges due to their unique writing systems, which differ from international standards. This discrepancy has led to a severe lack of relevant corpora, particularly for supervised tasks like headline generation. To address this gap, we introduce a novel dataset, Chinese Minority Headline Generation (CMHG), which includes 100,000 entries for Tibetan, and 50,000 entries each for Uyghur and Mongolian, specifically curated for headline generation tasks. Additionally, we propose a high-quality test set annotated by native speakers, designed to serve as a benchmark for future research in this domain. We hope this dataset will become a valuable resource for advancing headline generation in Chinese minority languages and contribute to the development of related benchmarks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09990 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 06:18:44 +0000 - Reasoning Introduces New Poisoning Attacks Yet Makes Them More Complicated - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05739 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.05739.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hanna Foerster, Ilia Shumailov, Yiren Zhao, Harsh Chaudhari, Jamie Hayes, Robert Mullins, Yarin Gal</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Early research into data poisoning attacks against Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrated the ease with which backdoors could be injected. More recent LLMs add step-by-step reasoning, expanding the attack surface to include the intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) and its inherent trait of decomposing problems into subproblems. Using these vectors for more stealthy poisoning, we introduce ``decomposed reasoning poison'', in which the attacker modifies only the reasoning path, leaving prompts and final answers clean, and splits the trigger across multiple, individually harmless components. Fascinatingly, while it remains possible to inject these decomposed poisons, reliably activating them to change final answers (rather than just the CoT) is surprisingly difficult. This difficulty arises because the models can often recover from backdoors that are activated within their thought processes. Ultimately, it appears that an emergent form of backdoor robustness is originating from the reasoning capabilities of these advanced LLMs, as well as from the architectural separation between reasoning and final answer generation.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05739 - Sat, 06 Sep 2025 15:06:18 +0000 + QuantAgent: Price-Driven Multi-Agent LLMs for High-Frequency Trading + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09995 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09995.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Fei Xiong, Xiang Zhang, Aosong Feng, Siqi Sun, Chenyu You</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in financial reasoning and market understanding. Multi-agent LLM frameworks such as TradingAgent and FINMEM augment these models to long-horizon investment tasks, leveraging fundamental and sentiment-based inputs for strategic decision-making. However, such systems are ill-suited for the high-speed, precision-critical demands of High-Frequency Trading (HFT). HFT requires rapid, risk-aware decisions based on structured, short-horizon signals, including technical indicators, chart patterns, and trend-based features, distinct from the long-term semantic reasoning typical of traditional financial LLM applications. To this end, we introduce QuantAgent, the first multi-agent LLM framework explicitly designed for high-frequency algorithmic trading. The system decomposes trading into four specialized agents, Indicator, Pattern, Trend, and Risk, each equipped with domain-specific tools and structured reasoning capabilities to capture distinct aspects of market dynamics over short temporal windows. In zero-shot evaluations across ten financial instruments, including Bitcoin and Nasdaq futures, QuantAgent demonstrates superior performance in both predictive accuracy and cumulative return over 4-hour trading intervals, outperforming strong neural and rule-based baselines. Our findings suggest that combining structured financial priors with language-native reasoning unlocks new potential for traceable, real-time decision systems in high-frequency financial markets.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09995 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 06:35:40 +0000 - UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Experts - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06155 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06155.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Duomin Wang, Wei Zuo, Aojie Li, Ling-Hao Chen, Xinyao Liao, Deyu Zhou, Zixin Yin, Xili Dai, Daxin Jiang, Gang Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce UniVerse-1, a unified, Veo-3-like model capable of simultaneously generating coordinated audio and video. To enhance training efficiency, we bypass training from scratch and instead employ a stitching of experts (SoE) technique. This approach deeply fuses the corresponding blocks of pre-trained video and music generation experts models, thereby fully leveraging their foundational capabilities. To ensure accurate annotations and temporal alignment for both ambient sounds and speech with video content, we developed an online annotation pipeline that processes the required training data and generates labels during training process. This strategy circumvents the performance degradation often caused by misalignment text-based annotations. Through the synergy of these techniques, our model, after being finetuned on approximately 7,600 hours of audio-video data, produces results with well-coordinated audio-visuals for ambient sounds generation and strong alignment for speech generation. To systematically evaluate our proposed method, we introduce Verse-Bench, a new benchmark dataset. In an effort to advance research in audio-video generation and to close the performance gap with state-of-the-art models such as Veo3, we make our model and code publicly available. We hope this contribution will benefit the broader research community. Project page: https://dorniwang.github.io/UniVerse-1/.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06155 - Sun, 07 Sep 2025 17:55:03 +0000 + Color Me Correctly: Bridging Perceptual Color Spaces and Text Embeddings for Improved Diffusion Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10058 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10058.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sung-Lin Tsai, Bo-Lun Huang, Yu Ting Shen, Cheng Yu Yeo, Chiang Tseng, Bo-Kai Ruan, Wen-Sheng Lien, Hong-Han Shuai</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Accurate color alignment in text-to-image (T2I) generation is critical for applications such as fashion, product visualization, and interior design, yet current diffusion models struggle with nuanced and compound color terms (e.g., Tiffany blue, lime green, hot pink), often producing images that are misaligned with human intent. Existing approaches rely on cross-attention manipulation, reference images, or fine-tuning but fail to systematically resolve ambiguous color descriptions. To precisely render colors under prompt ambiguity, we propose a training-free framework that enhances color fidelity by leveraging a large language model (LLM) to disambiguate color-related prompts and guiding color blending operations directly in the text embedding space. Our method first employs a large language model (LLM) to resolve ambiguous color terms in the text prompt, and then refines the text embeddings based on the spatial relationships of the resulting color terms in the CIELAB color space. Unlike prior methods, our approach improves color accuracy without requiring additional training or external reference images. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework improves color alignment without compromising image quality, bridging the gap between text semantics and visual generation.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10058 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:44:22 +0000 - Reverse-Engineered Reasoning for Open-Ended Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06160 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06160.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haozhe Wang, Haoran Que, Qixin Xu, Minghao Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Jiazhan Feng, Wanjun Zhong, Wei Ye, Tong Yang, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang, Fangzhen Lin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 139</p><p><b>Summary:</b> While the ``deep reasoning'' paradigm has spurred significant advances in verifiable domains like mathematics, its application to open-ended, creative generation remains a critical challenge. The two dominant methods for instilling reasoning -- reinforcement learning (RL) and instruction distillation -- falter in this area; RL struggles with the absence of clear reward signals and high-quality reward models, while distillation is prohibitively expensive and capped by the teacher model's capabilities. To overcome these limitations, we introduce REverse-Engineered Reasoning (REER), a new paradigm that fundamentally shifts the approach. Instead of building a reasoning process ``forwards'' through trial-and-error or imitation, REER works ``backwards'' from known-good solutions to computationally discover the latent, step-by-step deep reasoning process that could have produced them. Using this scalable, gradient-free approach, we curate and open-source DeepWriting-20K, a large-scale dataset of 20,000 deep reasoning trajectories for open-ended tasks. Our model, DeepWriter-8B, trained on this data, not only surpasses strong open-source baselines but also achieves performance competitive with, and at times superior to, leading proprietary models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06160 - Sun, 07 Sep 2025 18:07:58 +0000 + Virtual Agent Economies + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10147 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10147.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Nenad Tomasev, Matija Franklin, Joel Z. Leibo, Julian Jacobs, William A. Cunningham, Iason Gabriel, Simon Osindero</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The rapid adoption of autonomous AI agents is giving rise to a new economic layer where agents transact and coordinate at scales and speeds beyond direct human oversight. We propose the "sandbox economy" as a framework for analyzing this emergent system, characterizing it along two key dimensions: its origins (emergent vs. intentional) and its degree of separateness from the established human economy (permeable vs. impermeable). Our current trajectory points toward a spontaneous emergence of a vast and highly permeable AI agent economy, presenting us with opportunities for an unprecedented degree of coordination as well as significant challenges, including systemic economic risk and exacerbated inequality. Here we discuss a number of possible design choices that may lead to safely steerable AI agent markets. In particular, we consider auction mechanisms for fair resource allocation and preference resolution, the design of AI "mission economies" to coordinate around achieving collective goals, and socio-technical infrastructure needed to ensure trust, safety, and accountability. By doing this, we argue for the proactive design of steerable agent markets to ensure the coming technological shift aligns with humanity's long-term collective flourishing.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10147 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:20:11 +0000 - Spatial Reasoning with Vision-Language Models in Ego-Centric Multi-View Scenes - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06266 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06266.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mohsen Gholami, Ahmad Rezaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Understanding 3D spatial relationships remains a major limitation of current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Prior work has addressed this issue by creating spatial question-answering (QA) datasets based on single images or indoor videos. However, real-world embodied AI agents such as robots and self-driving cars typically rely on ego-centric, multi-view observations. To this end, we introduce Ego3D-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the spatial reasoning abilities of VLMs using ego-centric, multi-view outdoor data. Ego3D-Bench comprises over 8,600 QA pairs, created with significant involvement from human annotators to ensure quality and diversity. We benchmark 16 SOTA VLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini1.5-Pro, InternVL3, and Qwen2.5-VL. Our results reveal a notable performance gap between human level scores and VLM performance, highlighting that current VLMs still fall short of human level spatial understanding. To bridge this gap, we propose Ego3D-VLM, a post-training framework that enhances 3D spatial reasoning of VLMs. Ego3D-VLM generates cognitive map based on estimated global 3D coordinates, resulting in 12% average improvement on multi-choice QA and 56% average improvement on absolute distance estimation. Ego3D-VLM is modular and can be integrated with any existing VLM. Together, Ego3D-Bench and Ego3D-VLM offer valuable tools for advancing toward human level spatial understanding in real-world, multi-view environments.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06266 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 01:08:41 +0000 + Inpainting-Guided Policy Optimization for Diffusion Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10396 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10396.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Siyan Zhao, Mengchen Liu, Jing Huang, Miao Liu, Chenyu Wang, Bo Liu, Yuandong Tian, Guan Pang, Sean Bell, Aditya Grover, Feiyu Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as promising alternatives to autoregressive LLMs, offering competitive performance while supporting unique generation capabilities such as inpainting. We explore how inpainting can inform RL algorithm design for dLLMs. Aligning LLMs with reinforcement learning faces an exploration challenge: sparse reward signals and sample waste when models fail to discover correct solutions. While this inefficiency affects LLMs broadly, dLLMs offer a distinctive opportunity--their inpainting ability can guide exploration. We introduce IGPO (Inpainting Guided Policy Optimization), an RL framework that strategically inserts partial ground-truth reasoning traces during online sampling. Unlike providing full solutions, inpainting steers exploration toward promising trajectory spaces while preserving self-generated reasoning, bridging supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. We apply IGPO to group-based optimization methods such as GRPO, where exploration failures cause zero advantages and gradients. IGPO restores meaningful gradients while improving sample efficiency. We also propose supervised fine-tuning on synthetically rewritten concise traces that better align with dLLM generation patterns. With additional techniques including entropy-based filtering, our training recipe yields substantial gains across three mathematical benchmarks--GSM8K, Math500, and AMC--achieving new state-of-the-art results for full-attention masked dLLMs.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10396 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 16:44:31 +0000 - SFR-DeepResearch: Towards Effective Reinforcement Learning for Autonomously Reasoning Single Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06283 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06283.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Shrey Pandit, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Austin Xu, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Equipping large language models (LLMs) with complex, interleaved reasoning and tool-use capabilities has become a key focus in agentic AI research, especially with recent advances in reasoning-oriented (``thinking'') models. Such capabilities are key to unlocking a number of important applications. One such application is Deep Research (DR), which requires extensive search and reasoning over many sources. Our work in this paper focuses on the development of native Autonomous Single-Agent models for DR featuring minimal web crawling and Python tool integration. Unlike multi-agent systems, where agents take up pre-defined roles and are told what to do at each step in a static workflow, an autonomous single-agent determines its next action dynamically based on context, without manual directive. While prior work has proposed training recipes for base or instruction-tuned LLMs, we focus on continual reinforcement learning (RL) of reasoning-optimized models to further enhance agentic skills while preserving reasoning ability. Towards this end, we propose a simple RL recipe with entirely synthetic data, which we apply to various open-source LLMs. Our best variant SFR-DR-20B achieves up to 28.7% on Humanity's Last Exam benchmark. In addition, we conduct key analysis experiments to provide more insights into our methodologies.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06283 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 02:07:09 +0000 + RecoWorld: Building Simulated Environments for Agentic Recommender Systems + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10397 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10397.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Fei Liu, Xinyu Lin, Hanchao Yu, Mingyuan Wu, Jianyu Wang, Qiang Zhang, Zhuokai Zhao, Yinglong Xia, Yao Zhang, Weiwei Li, Mingze Gao, Qifan Wang, Lizhu Zhang, Benyu Zhang, Xiangjun Fan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present RecoWorld, a blueprint for building simulated environments tailored to agentic recommender systems. Such environments give agents a proper training space where they can learn from errors without impacting real users. RecoWorld distinguishes itself with a dual-view architecture: a simulated user and an agentic recommender engage in multi-turn interactions aimed at maximizing user retention. The user simulator reviews recommended items, updates its mindset, and when sensing potential user disengagement, generates reflective instructions. The agentic recommender adapts its recommendations by incorporating these user instructions and reasoning traces, creating a dynamic feedback loop that actively engages users. This process leverages the exceptional reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs. We explore diverse content representations within the simulator, including text-based, multimodal, and semantic ID modeling, and discuss how multi-turn RL enables the recommender to refine its strategies through iterative interactions. RecoWorld also supports multi-agent simulations, allowing creators to simulate the responses of targeted user populations. It marks an important first step toward recommender systems where users and agents collaboratively shape personalized information streams. We envision new interaction paradigms where "user instructs, recommender responds," jointly optimizing user retention and engagement.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10397 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 16:44:34 +0000 - DCReg: Decoupled Characterization for Efficient Degenerate LiDAR Registration - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06285 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06285.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiangcheng Hu, Xieyuanli Chen, Mingkai Jia, Jin Wu, Ping Tan, Steven L. Waslander</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> LiDAR point cloud registration is fundamental to robotic perception and navigation. However, in geometrically degenerate or narrow environments, registration problems become ill-conditioned, leading to unstable solutions and degraded accuracy. While existing approaches attempt to handle these issues, they fail to address the core challenge: accurately detection, interpret, and resolve this ill-conditioning, leading to missed detections or corrupted solutions. In this study, we introduce DCReg, a principled framework that systematically addresses the ill-conditioned registration problems through three integrated innovations. First, DCReg achieves reliable ill-conditioning detection by employing a Schur complement decomposition to the hessian matrix. This technique decouples the registration problem into clean rotational and translational subspaces, eliminating coupling effects that mask degeneracy patterns in conventional analyses. Second, within these cleanly subspaces, we develop quantitative characterization techniques that establish explicit mappings between mathematical eigenspaces and physical motion directions, providing actionable insights about which specific motions lack constraints. Finally, leveraging this clean subspace, we design a targeted mitigation strategy: a novel preconditioner that selectively stabilizes only the identified ill-conditioned directions while preserving all well-constrained information in observable space. This enables efficient and robust optimization via the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method with a single physical interpretable parameter. Extensive experiments demonstrate DCReg achieves at least 20% - 50% improvement in localization accuracy and 5-100 times speedup over state-of-the-art methods across diverse environments. Our implementation will be available at https://github.com/JokerJohn/DCReg.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06285 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 02:12:54 +0000 + Developer-LLM Conversations: An Empirical Study of Interactions and Generated Code Quality + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10402 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10402.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Suzhen Zhong, Ying Zou, Bram Adams</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming integral to modern software development workflows, assisting developers with code generation, API explanation, and iterative problem-solving through natural language conversations. Despite widespread adoption, there is limited understanding of how developers interact with LLMs in practice and how these conversational dynamics influence task outcomes, code quality, and software engineering workflows. To address this, we leverage CodeChat, a large dataset comprising 82,845 real-world developer-LLM conversations, containing 368,506 code snippets generated across over 20 programming languages, derived from the WildChat dataset. We find that LLM responses are substantially longer than developer prompts, with a median token-length ratio of 14:1. Multi-turn conversations account for 68% of the dataset and often evolve due to shifting requirements, incomplete prompts, or clarification requests. Topic analysis identifies web design (9.6% of conversations) and neural network training (8.7% of conversations) as the most frequent LLM-assisted tasks. Evaluation across five languages (i.e., Python, JavaScript, C++, Java, and C#) reveals prevalent and language-specific issues in LLM-generated code: generated Python and JavaScript code often include undefined variables (83.4% and 75.3% of code snippets, respectively); Java code lacks required comments (75.9%); C++ code frequently omits headers (41.1%) and C# code shows unresolved namespaces (49.2%). During a conversation, syntax and import errors persist across turns; however, documentation quality in Java improves by up to 14.7%, and import handling in Python improves by 3.7% over 5 turns. Prompts that point out mistakes in code generated in prior turns and explicitly request a fix are most effective for resolving errors.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10402 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 16:52:49 +0000 - Focusing by Contrastive Attention: Enhancing VLMs' Visual Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06461 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06461.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuyao Ge, Shenghua Liu, Yiwei Wang, Lingrui Mei, Baolong Bi, Xuanshan Zhou, Jiayu Yao, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 16</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse visual tasks, yet their performance degrades in complex visual environments. While existing enhancement approaches require additional training, rely on external segmentation tools, or operate at coarse-grained levels, they overlook the innate ability within VLMs. To bridge this gap, we investigate VLMs' attention patterns and discover that: (1) visual complexity strongly correlates with attention entropy, negatively impacting reasoning performance; (2) attention progressively refines from global scanning in shallow layers to focused convergence in deeper layers, with convergence degree determined by visual complexity. (3) Theoretically, we prove that the contrast of attention maps between general queries and task-specific queries enables the decomposition of visual signal into semantic signals and visual noise components. Building on these insights, we propose Contrastive Attention Refinement for Visual Enhancement (CARVE), a training-free method that extracts task-relevant visual signals through attention contrasting at the pixel level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARVE consistently enhances performance, achieving up to 75% improvement on open-source models. Our work provides critical insights into the interplay between visual complexity and attention mechanisms, offering an efficient pathway for improving visual reasoning with contrasting attention.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06461 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:20:04 +0000 + InfGen: A Resolution-Agnostic Paradigm for Scalable Image Synthesis + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10441 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10441.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tao Han, Wanghan Xu, Junchao Gong, Xiaoyu Yue, Song Guo, Luping Zhou, Lei Bai</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 30</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Arbitrary resolution image generation provides a consistent visual experience across devices, having extensive applications for producers and consumers. Current diffusion models increase computational demand quadratically with resolution, causing 4K image generation delays over 100 seconds. To solve this, we explore the second generation upon the latent diffusion models, where the fixed latent generated by diffusion models is regarded as the content representation and we propose to decode arbitrary resolution images with a compact generated latent using a one-step generator. Thus, we present the InfGen, replacing the VAE decoder with the new generator, for generating images at any resolution from a fixed-size latent without retraining the diffusion models, which simplifies the process, reducing computational complexity and can be applied to any model using the same latent space. Experiments show InfGen is capable of improving many models into the arbitrary high-resolution era while cutting 4K image generation time to under 10 seconds.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10441 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 17:48:57 +0000 - Does DINOv3 Set a New Medical Vision Standard? - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06467 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06467.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Che Liu, Yinda Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Jinpeng Lu, Bailiang Jian, Jiazhen Pan, Linghan Cai, Jiayi Wang, Yundi Zhang, Jun Li, Cosmin I. Bercea, Cheng Ouyang, Chen Chen, Zhiwei Xiong, Benedikt Wiestler, Christian Wachinger, Daniel Rueckert, Wenjia Bai, Rossella Arcucci</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 34</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The advent of large-scale vision foundation models, pre-trained on diverse natural images, has marked a paradigm shift in computer vision. However, how the frontier vision foundation models' efficacies transfer to specialized domains remains such as medical imaging remains an open question. This report investigates whether DINOv3, a state-of-the-art self-supervised vision transformer (ViT) that features strong capability in dense prediction tasks, can directly serve as a powerful, unified encoder for medical vision tasks without domain-specific pre-training. To answer this, we benchmark DINOv3 across common medical vision tasks, including 2D/3D classification and segmentation on a wide range of medical imaging modalities. We systematically analyze its scalability by varying model sizes and input image resolutions. Our findings reveal that DINOv3 shows impressive performance and establishes a formidable new baseline. Remarkably, it can even outperform medical-specific foundation models like BiomedCLIP and CT-Net on several tasks, despite being trained solely on natural images. However, we identify clear limitations: The model's features degrade in scenarios requiring deep domain specialization, such as in Whole-Slide Pathological Images (WSIs), Electron Microscopy (EM), and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Furthermore, we observe that DINOv3 does not consistently obey scaling law in the medical domain; performance does not reliably increase with larger models or finer feature resolutions, showing diverse scaling behaviors across tasks. Ultimately, our work establishes DINOv3 as a strong baseline, whose powerful visual features can serve as a robust prior for multiple complex medical tasks. This opens promising future directions, such as leveraging its features to enforce multiview consistency in 3D reconstruction.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06467 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:28:57 +0000 + Stable Part Diffusion 4D: Multi-View RGB and Kinematic Parts Video Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10687 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10687.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hao Zhang, Chun-Han Yao, Simon Donné, Narendra Ahuja, Varun Jampani</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Stable Part Diffusion 4D (SP4D), a framework for generating paired RGB and kinematic part videos from monocular inputs. Unlike conventional part segmentation methods that rely on appearance-based semantic cues, SP4D learns to produce kinematic parts - structural components aligned with object articulation and consistent across views and time. SP4D adopts a dual-branch diffusion model that jointly synthesizes RGB frames and corresponding part segmentation maps. To simplify the architecture and flexibly enable different part counts, we introduce a spatial color encoding scheme that maps part masks to continuous RGB-like images. This encoding allows the segmentation branch to share the latent VAE from the RGB branch, while enabling part segmentation to be recovered via straightforward post-processing. A Bidirectional Diffusion Fusion (BiDiFuse) module enhances cross-branch consistency, supported by a contrastive part consistency loss to promote spatial and temporal alignment of part predictions. We demonstrate that the generated 2D part maps can be lifted to 3D to derive skeletal structures and harmonic skinning weights with few manual adjustments. To train and evaluate SP4D, we construct KinematicParts20K, a curated dataset of over 20K rigged objects selected and processed from Objaverse XL (Deitke et al., 2023), each paired with multi-view RGB and part video sequences. Experiments show that SP4D generalizes strongly to diverse scenarios, including real-world videos, novel generated objects, and rare articulated poses, producing kinematic-aware outputs suitable for downstream animation and motion-related tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10687 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:39:43 +0000 - MAS-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Shortcut-Augmented Hybrid Mobile GUI Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06477 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06477.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Yaozhen Liang, Weiqing He, Zhengxi Lu, Yuehao Huang, Yaxuan Guo, Kexin Zhang, Hao Wang, Liang Liu, Yong Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> To enhance the efficiency of GUI agents on various platforms like smartphones and computers, a hybrid paradigm that combines flexible GUI operations with efficient shortcuts (e.g., API, deep links) is emerging as a promising direction. However, a framework for systematically benchmarking these hybrid agents is still underexplored. To take the first step in bridging this gap, we introduce MAS-Bench, a benchmark that pioneers the evaluation of GUI-shortcut hybrid agents with a specific focus on the mobile domain. Beyond merely using predefined shortcuts, MAS-Bench assesses an agent's capability to autonomously generate shortcuts by discovering and creating reusable, low-cost workflows. It features 139 complex tasks across 11 real-world applications, a knowledge base of 88 predefined shortcuts (APIs, deep-links, RPA scripts), and 7 evaluation metrics. The tasks are designed to be solvable via GUI-only operations, but can be significantly accelerated by intelligently embedding shortcuts. Experiments show that hybrid agents achieve significantly higher success rates and efficiency than their GUI-only counterparts. This result also demonstrates the effectiveness of our method for evaluating an agent's shortcut generation capabilities. MAS-Bench fills a critical evaluation gap, providing a foundational platform for future advancements in creating more efficient and robust intelligent agents.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06477 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:43:48 +0000 + Struct-Bench: A Benchmark for Differentially Private Structured Text Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10696 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10696.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shuaiqi Wang, Vikas Raunak, Arturs Backurs, Victor Reis, Pei Zhou, Sihao Chen, Longqi Yang, Zinan Lin, Sergey Yekhanin, Giulia Fanti</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Differentially private (DP) synthetic data generation is a promising technique for utilizing private datasets that otherwise cannot be exposed for model training or other analytics. While much research literature has focused on generating private unstructured text and image data, in enterprise settings, structured data (e.g., tabular) is more common, often including natural language fields or components. Existing synthetic data evaluation techniques (e.g., FID) struggle to capture the structural properties and correlations of such datasets. In this work, we propose Struct-Bench, a framework and benchmark for evaluating synthetic datasets derived from structured datasets that contain natural language data. The Struct-Bench framework requires users to provide a representation of their dataset structure as a Context-Free Grammar (CFG). Our benchmark comprises 5 real-world and 2 synthetically generated datasets, each annotated with CFGs. We show that these datasets demonstrably present a great challenge even for state-of-the-art DP synthetic data generation methods. Struct-Bench also includes reference implementations of different metrics and a leaderboard, thereby providing researchers a standardized evaluation platform to benchmark and investigate privacy-preserving synthetic data generation methods. Further, we also present a case study showing how to use Struct-Bench to improve the synthetic data quality of Private Evolution (PE) on structured data. The benchmark and the leaderboard have been publicly made available at https://struct-bench.github.io.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10696 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:18:13 +0000 - Scaling up Multi-Turn Off-Policy RL and Multi-Agent Tree Search for LLM Step-Provers - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06493 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06493.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ran Xin, Zeyu Zheng, Yanchen Nie, Kun Yuan, Xia Xiao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into automated theorem proving has shown immense promise, yet is fundamentally constrained by challenges in scaling up both training-time reinforcement learning (RL) and inference-time compute. This paper introduces BFS-Prover-V2, a system designed to address this dual scaling problem. We present two primary innovations. The first is a novel multi-turn off-policy RL framework for continually improving the performance of LLM step-prover at training time. This framework, inspired by the principles of AlphaZero, utilizes a multi-stage expert iteration pipeline featuring adaptive tactic-level data filtering and periodic retraining to surmount the performance plateaus that typically curtail long-term RL in LLM-based agents. The second innovation is a planner-enhanced multi-agent search architecture that scales reasoning capabilities at inference time. This architecture employs a general reasoning model as a high-level planner to iteratively decompose complex theorems into a sequence of simpler subgoals. This hierarchical approach substantially reduces the search space, enabling a team of parallel prover agents to collaborate efficiently by leveraging a shared proof cache. We demonstrate that this dual approach to scaling yields state-of-the-art results on established formal mathematics benchmarks. BFS-Prover-V2 achieves 95.08\% and 41.4\% on the MiniF2F and ProofNet test sets respectively. While demonstrated in the domain of formal mathematics, the RL and inference techniques presented in this work are of broader interest and may be applied to other domains requiring long-horizon multi-turn reasoning and complex search.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06493 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:54:18 +0000 + Sound Matching an Analogue Levelling Amplifier Using the Newton-Raphson Method + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10706 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10706.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chin-Yun Yu, György Fazekas</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Automatic differentiation through digital signal processing algorithms for virtual analogue modelling has recently gained popularity. These algorithms are typically more computationally efficient than black-box neural networks that rely on dense matrix multiplications. Due to their differentiable nature, they can be integrated with neural networks and jointly trained using gradient descent algorithms, resulting in more efficient systems. Furthermore, signal processing algorithms have significantly fewer parameters than neural networks, allowing the application of the Newton-Raphson method. This method offers faster and more robust convergence than gradient descent at the cost of quadratic storage. This paper presents a method to emulate analogue levelling amplifiers using a feed-forward digital compressor with parameters optimised via the Newton-Raphson method. We demonstrate that a digital compressor can successfully approximate the behaviour of our target unit, the Teletronix LA-2A. Different strategies for computing the Hessian matrix are benchmarked. We leverage parallel algorithms for recursive filters to achieve efficient training on modern GPUs. The resulting model is made into a VST plugin and is open-sourced at https://github.com/aim-qmul/4a2a.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10706 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:48:30 +0000 - WebExplorer: Explore and Evolve for Training Long-Horizon Web Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06501 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06501.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Junteng Liu, Yunji Li, Chi Zhang, Jingyang Li, Aili Chen, Ke Ji, Weiyu Cheng, Zijia Wu, Chengyu Du, Qidi Xu, Jiayuan Song, Zhengmao Zhu, Wenhu Chen, Pengyu Zhao, Junxian He</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 75</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increasingly shifted toward agentic applications, where web browsing capabilities are fundamental for retrieving information from diverse online sources. However, existing open-source web agents either demonstrate limited information-seeking abilities on complex tasks or lack transparent implementations. In this work, we identify that the key challenge lies in the scarcity of challenging data for information seeking. To address this limitation, we introduce WebExplorer: a systematic data generation approach using model-based exploration and iterative, long-to-short query evolution. This method creates challenging query-answer pairs that require multi-step reasoning and complex web navigation. By leveraging our curated high-quality dataset, we successfully develop advanced web agent WebExplorer-8B through supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. Our model supports 128K context length and up to 100 tool calling turns, enabling long-horizon problem solving. Across diverse information-seeking benchmarks, WebExplorer-8B achieves the state-of-the-art performance at its scale. Notably, as an 8B-sized model, WebExplorer-8B is able to effectively search over an average of 16 turns after RL training, achieving higher accuracy than WebSailor-72B on BrowseComp-en/zh and attaining the best performance among models up to 100B parameters on WebWalkerQA and FRAMES. Beyond these information-seeking tasks, our model also achieves strong generalization on the HLE benchmark even though it is only trained on knowledge-intensive QA data. These results highlight our approach as a practical path toward long-horizon web agents.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06501 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:07:03 +0000 + SearchInstruct: Enhancing Domain Adaptation via Retrieval-Based Instruction Dataset Creation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10708 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10708.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Iman Barati, Mostafa Amiri, Heshaam Faili</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 16</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is essential for training large language models (LLMs), significantly enhancing critical capabilities such as instruction following and in-context learning. Nevertheless, creating suitable training datasets tailored for specific domains remains challenging due to unique domain constraints and data scarcity. In this paper, we propose SearchInstruct, an innovative method explicitly designed to construct high quality instruction datasets for SFT. Our approach begins with a limited set of domain specific, human generated questions, which are systematically expanded using a large language model. Subsequently, domain relevant resources are dynamically retrieved to generate accurate and contextually appropriate answers for each augmented question. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that SearchInstruct enhances both the diversity and quality of SFT datasets, leading to measurable improvements in LLM performance within specialized domains. Additionally, we show that beyond dataset generation, the proposed method can also effectively facilitate tasks such as model editing, enabling efficient updates to existing models. To facilitate reproducibility and community adoption, we provide full implementation details, the complete set of generated instruction response pairs, and the source code in a publicly accessible Git repository: [https://github.com/mostafaamiri/SearchInstruct](https://github.com/mostafaamiri/SearchInstruct)</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10708 + Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:50:39 +0000 - Guided Decoding and Its Critical Role in Retrieval-Augmented Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06631 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06631.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Özgür Uğur, Musa Yılmaz, Esra Şavirdi, Özay Ezerceli, Mahmut El Huseyni, Selva Taş, Reyhan Bayraktar</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into various applications has driven the need for structured and reliable responses. A key challenge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems is ensuring that outputs align with expected formats while minimizing hallucinations. This study examines the role of guided decoding in RAG systems, comparing three methods, Outlines, XGrammar, and LM Format Enforcer, across different multi-turn prompting setups (0-turn, 1-turn, and 2-turn). By evaluating success rates, hallucination rates, and output quality, we provide insights into their performance and applicability. Our findings reveal how multi-turn interactions influence guided decoding, uncovering unexpected performance variations that can inform method selection for specific use cases. This work advances the understanding of structured output generation in RAG systems, offering both theoretical insights and practical guidance for LLM deployment.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06631 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:51:40 +0000 + InternScenes: A Large-scale Simulatable Indoor Scene Dataset with Realistic Layouts + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10813 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10813.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weipeng Zhong, Peizhou Cao, Yichen Jin, Li Luo, Wenzhe Cai, Jingli Lin, Hanqing Wang, Zhaoyang Lyu, Tai Wang, Bo Dai, Xudong Xu, Jiangmiao Pang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 30</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The advancement of Embodied AI heavily relies on large-scale, simulatable 3D scene datasets characterized by scene diversity and realistic layouts. However, existing datasets typically suffer from limitations in data scale or diversity, sanitized layouts lacking small items, and severe object collisions. To address these shortcomings, we introduce InternScenes, a novel large-scale simulatable indoor scene dataset comprising approximately 40,000 diverse scenes by integrating three disparate scene sources, real-world scans, procedurally generated scenes, and designer-created scenes, including 1.96M 3D objects and covering 15 common scene types and 288 object classes. We particularly preserve massive small items in the scenes, resulting in realistic and complex layouts with an average of 41.5 objects per region. Our comprehensive data processing pipeline ensures simulatability by creating real-to-sim replicas for real-world scans, enhances interactivity by incorporating interactive objects into these scenes, and resolves object collisions by physical simulations. We demonstrate the value of InternScenes with two benchmark applications: scene layout generation and point-goal navigation. Both show the new challenges posed by the complex and realistic layouts. More importantly, InternScenes paves the way for scaling up the model training for both tasks, making the generation and navigation in such complex scenes possible. We commit to open-sourcing the data, models, and benchmarks to benefit the whole community.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10813 + Sat, 13 Sep 2025 14:25:17 +0000 - Reinforcement Learning Foundations for Deep Research Systems: A Survey - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06733 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06733.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wenjun Li, Zhi Chen, Jingru Lin, Hannan Cao, Wei Han, Sheng Liang, Zhi Zhang, Kuicai Dong, Dexun Li, Chen Zhang, Yong Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 30</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Deep research systems, agentic AI that solve complex, multi-step tasks by coordinating reasoning, search across the open web and user files, and tool use, are moving toward hierarchical deployments with a Planner, Coordinator, and Executors. In practice, training entire stacks end-to-end remains impractical, so most work trains a single planner connected to core tools such as search, browsing, and code. While SFT imparts protocol fidelity, it suffers from imitation and exposure biases and underuses environment feedback. Preference alignment methods such as DPO are schema and proxy-dependent, off-policy, and weak for long-horizon credit assignment and multi-objective trade-offs. A further limitation of SFT and DPO is their reliance on human defined decision points and subskills through schema design and labeled comparisons. Reinforcement learning aligns with closed-loop, tool-interaction research by optimizing trajectory-level policies, enabling exploration, recovery behaviors, and principled credit assignment, and it reduces dependence on such human priors and rater biases. This survey is, to our knowledge, the first dedicated to the RL foundations of deep research systems. It systematizes work after DeepSeek-R1 along three axes: (i) data synthesis and curation; (ii) RL methods for agentic research covering stability, sample efficiency, long context handling, reward and credit design, multi-objective optimization, and multimodal integration; and (iii) agentic RL training systems and frameworks. We also cover agent architecture and coordination, as well as evaluation and benchmarks, including recent QA, VQA, long-form synthesis, and domain-grounded, tool-interaction tasks. We distill recurring patterns, surface infrastructure bottlenecks, and offer practical guidance for training robust, transparent deep research agents with RL.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06733 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 14:27:23 +0000 + GAPrune: Gradient-Alignment Pruning for Domain-Aware Embeddings + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10844 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10844.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Domain-specific embedding models have shown promise for applications that require specialized semantic understanding, such as coding agents and financial retrieval systems, often achieving higher performance gains than general models. However, state-of-the-art embedding models are typically based on LLMs, which contain billions of parameters, making deployment challenging in resource-constrained environments. Model compression through pruning offers a promising solution, but existing pruning methods treat all parameters uniformly, failing to distinguish between general semantic representations and domain-specific patterns, leading to suboptimal pruning decisions. Thus, we propose GAPrune, a pruning framework that addresses this challenge by considering both domain importance and preserving general linguistic foundation. Our method uses Fisher Information to measure importance and general-domain gradient alignment to assess parameter behavior, then combines these signals using our Domain Alignment Importance (DAI) scoring. Lower DAI scores indicate that the parameter is either less important for the domain task or creates conflicts between domain and general objectives. Experiments on two domain benchmarks, FinMTEB and ChemTEB, show that GAPrune maintains performance within 2.5% of dense models in one-shot pruning at 50% sparsity, while outperforming all baselines. With retraining in 100 steps, GAPrune achieves +4.51% improvement on FinMTEB and +1.73% on ChemTEB, demonstrating that our pruning strategy not only preserves but enhances domain-specific capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that principled pruning strategies can achieve model compression and enhanced domain specialization, providing the research community with a new approach for development.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10844 + Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:03:37 +0000 - D-HUMOR: Dark Humor Understanding via Multimodal Open-ended Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06771 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06771.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sai Kartheek Reddy Kasu, Mohammad Zia Ur Rehman, Shahid Shafi Dar, Rishi Bharat Junghare, Dhanvin Sanjay Namboodiri, Nagendra Kumar</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Dark humor in online memes poses unique challenges due to its reliance on implicit, sensitive, and culturally contextual cues. To address the lack of resources and methods for detecting dark humor in multimodal content, we introduce a novel dataset of 4,379 Reddit memes annotated for dark humor, target category (gender, mental health, violence, race, disability, and other), and a three-level intensity rating (mild, moderate, severe). Building on this resource, we propose a reasoning-augmented framework that first generates structured explanations for each meme using a Large Vision-Language Model (VLM). Through a Role-Reversal Self-Loop, VLM adopts the author's perspective to iteratively refine its explanations, ensuring completeness and alignment. We then extract textual features from both the OCR transcript and the self-refined reasoning via a text encoder, while visual features are obtained using a vision transformer. A Tri-stream Cross-Reasoning Network (TCRNet) fuses these three streams, text, image, and reasoning, via pairwise attention mechanisms, producing a unified representation for classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baselines across three tasks: dark humor detection, target identification, and intensity prediction. The dataset, annotations, and code are released to facilitate further research in multimodal humor understanding and content moderation. Code and Dataset are available at: https://github.com/Sai-Kartheek-Reddy/D-Humor-Dark-Humor-Understanding-via-Multimodal-Open-ended-Reasoning</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06771 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 14:55:16 +0000 + Nav-R1: Reasoning and Navigation in Embodied Scenes + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10884 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.10884.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Qingxiang Liu, Ting Huang, Zeyu Zhang, Hao Tang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Embodied navigation requires agents to integrate perception, reasoning, and action for robust interaction in complex 3D environments. Existing approaches often suffer from incoherent and unstable reasoning traces that hinder generalization across diverse environments, and difficulty balancing long-horizon semantic reasoning with low-latency control for real-time navigation. To address these challenges, we propose Nav-R1, an embodied foundation model that unifies reasoning in embodied environments. We first construct Nav-CoT-110K, a large-scale dataset of step-by-step Chains-of-Thought (CoT) for embodied tasks, which enables cold-start initialization with structured reasoning. Building on this foundation, we design a GRPO-based reinforcement learning framework with three complementary rewards: format, understanding, and navigation, to improve structural adherence, semantic grounding, and path fidelity. Furthermore, we introduce a Fast-in-Slow reasoning paradigm, decoupling deliberate semantic reasoning from low-latency reactive control for efficient yet coherent navigation. Extensive evaluations on embodied AI benchmarks demonstrate that Nav-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines, with over 8% average improvement in reasoning and navigation performance. Real-world deployment on a mobile robot further validates its robustness under limited onboard resources. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/Nav-R1. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/Nav-R1.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10884 + Sat, 13 Sep 2025 16:31:03 +0000 - P3-SAM: Native 3D Part Segmentation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06784 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06784.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Changfeng Ma, Yang Li, Xinhao Yan, Jiachen Xu, Yunhan Yang, Chunshi Wang, Zibo Zhao, Yanwen Guo, Zhuo Chen, Chunchao Guo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Segmenting 3D assets into their constituent parts is crucial for enhancing 3D understanding, facilitating model reuse, and supporting various applications such as part generation. However, current methods face limitations such as poor robustness when dealing with complex objects and cannot fully automate the process. In this paper, we propose a native 3D point-promptable part segmentation model termed P3-SAM, designed to fully automate the segmentation of any 3D objects into components. Inspired by SAM, P3-SAM consists of a feature extractor, multiple segmentation heads, and an IoU predictor, enabling interactive segmentation for users. We also propose an algorithm to automatically select and merge masks predicted by our model for part instance segmentation. Our model is trained on a newly built dataset containing nearly 3.7 million models with reasonable segmentation labels. Comparisons show that our method achieves precise segmentation results and strong robustness on any complex objects, attaining state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be released soon.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06784 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:12:17 +0000 + WildSmoke: Ready-to-Use Dynamic 3D Smoke Assets from a Single Video in the Wild + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11114 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11114.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuqiu Liu, Jialin Song, Manolis Savva, Wuyang Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We propose a pipeline to extract and reconstruct dynamic 3D smoke assets from a single in-the-wild video, and further integrate interactive simulation for smoke design and editing. Recent developments in 3D vision have significantly improved reconstructing and rendering fluid dynamics, supporting realistic and temporally consistent view synthesis. However, current fluid reconstructions rely heavily on carefully controlled clean lab environments, whereas real-world videos captured in the wild are largely underexplored. We pinpoint three key challenges of reconstructing smoke in real-world videos and design targeted techniques, including smoke extraction with background removal, initialization of smoke particles and camera poses, and inferring multi-view videos. Our method not only outperforms previous reconstruction and generation methods with high-quality smoke reconstructions (+2.22 average PSNR on wild videos), but also enables diverse and realistic editing of fluid dynamics by simulating our smoke assets. We provide our models, data, and 4D smoke assets at [https://autumnyq.github.io/WildSmoke](https://autumnyq.github.io/WildSmoke).</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11114 + Sun, 14 Sep 2025 06:06:42 +0000 - R^textbf{2AI}: Towards Resistant and Resilient AI in an Evolving World - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06786 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06786.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Youbang Sun, Xiang Wang, Jie Fu, Chaochao Lu, Bowen Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In this position paper, we address the persistent gap between rapidly growing AI capabilities and lagging safety progress. Existing paradigms divide into ``Make AI Safe'', which applies post-hoc alignment and guardrails but remains brittle and reactive, and ``Make Safe AI'', which emphasizes intrinsic safety but struggles to address unforeseen risks in open-ended environments. We therefore propose safe-by-coevolution as a new formulation of the ``Make Safe AI'' paradigm, inspired by biological immunity, in which safety becomes a dynamic, adversarial, and ongoing learning process. To operationalize this vision, we introduce R^2AI -- Resistant and Resilient AI -- as a practical framework that unites resistance against known threats with resilience to unforeseen risks. R^2AI integrates fast and slow safe models, adversarial simulation and verification through a safety wind tunnel, and continual feedback loops that guide safety and capability to coevolve. We argue that this framework offers a scalable and proactive path to maintain continual safety in dynamic environments, addressing both near-term vulnerabilities and long-term existential risks as AI advances toward AGI and ASI.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06786 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:13:23 +0000 + Optimal Brain Restoration for Joint Quantization and Sparsification of LLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11177 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11177.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hang Guo, Yawei Li, Luca Benini</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM) compression, such as quantization and pruning, have achieved notable success. However, as these techniques gradually approach their respective limits, relying on a single method for further compression has become increasingly challenging. In this work, we explore an alternative solution by combining quantization and sparsity. This joint approach, though promising, introduces new difficulties due to the inherently conflicting requirements on weight distributions: quantization favors compact ranges, while pruning benefits from high variance. To attack this problem, we propose Optimal Brain Restoration (OBR), a general and training-free framework that aligns pruning and quantization by error compensation between both. OBR minimizes performance degradation on downstream tasks by building on a second-order Hessian objective, which is then reformulated into a tractable problem through surrogate approximation and ultimately reaches a closed-form solution via group error compensation. Experiments show that OBR enables aggressive W4A4KV4 quantization with 50% sparsity on existing LLMs, and delivers up to 4.72x speedup and 6.4x memory reduction compared to the FP16-dense baseline.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11177 + Sun, 14 Sep 2025 09:17:19 +0000 - MachineLearningLM: Continued Pretraining Language Models on Millions of Synthetic Tabular Prediction Tasks Scales In-Context ML - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06806 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06806.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haoyu Dong, Pengkun Zhang, Mingzhe Lu, Yanzhen Shen, Guolin Ke</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 53</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) possess broad world knowledge and strong general-purpose reasoning ability, yet they struggle to learn from many in-context examples on standard machine learning (ML) tasks, that is, to leverage many-shot demonstrations purely via in-context learning (ICL) without gradient descent. We introduce MachineLearningLM, a portable continued-pretraining framework that equips a general-purpose LLM with robust in-context ML capability while preserving its general knowledge and reasoning for broader chat workflows. Our pretraining procedure synthesizes ML tasks from millions of structural causal models (SCMs), spanning shot counts up to 1,024. We begin with a random-forest teacher, distilling tree-based decision strategies into the LLM to strengthen robustness in numerical modeling. All tasks are serialized with a token-efficient prompt, enabling 3x to 6x more examples per context window and delivering up to 50x amortized throughput via batch inference. Despite a modest setup (Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct with LoRA rank 8), MachineLearningLM outperforms strong LLM baselines (e.g., GPT-5-mini) by an average of about 15% on out-of-distribution tabular classification across finance, physics, biology, and healthcare domains. It exhibits a striking many-shot scaling law: accuracy increases monotonically as in-context demonstrations grow from 8 to 1,024. Without any task-specific training, it attains random-forest-level accuracy across hundreds of shots. General chat capabilities, including knowledge and reasoning, are preserved: it achieves 75.4% on MMLU.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06806 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:38:31 +0000 + Hybrid Quantum-Classical Model for Image Classification + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13353 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13353.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Muhammad Adnan Shahzad</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This study presents a systematic comparison between hybrid quantum-classical neural networks and purely classical models across three benchmark datasets (MNIST, CIFAR100, and STL10) to evaluate their performance, efficiency, and robustness. The hybrid models integrate parameterized quantum circuits with classical deep learning architectures, while the classical counterparts use conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Experiments were conducted over 50 training epochs for each dataset, with evaluations on validation accuracy, test accuracy, training time, computational resource usage, and adversarial robustness (tested with epsilon=0.1 perturbations).Key findings demonstrate that hybrid models consistently outperform classical models in final accuracy, achieving {99.38\% (MNIST), 41.69\% (CIFAR100), and 74.05\% (STL10) validation accuracy, compared to classical benchmarks of 98.21\%, 32.25\%, and 63.76\%, respectively. Notably, the hybrid advantage scales with dataset complexity, showing the most significant gains on CIFAR100 (+9.44\%) and STL10 (+10.29\%). Hybrid models also train 5--12times faster (e.g., 21.23s vs. 108.44s per epoch on MNIST) and use 6--32\% fewer parameters} while maintaining superior generalization to unseen test data.Adversarial robustness tests reveal that hybrid models are significantly more resilient on simpler datasets (e.g., 45.27\% robust accuracy on MNIST vs. 10.80\% for classical) but show comparable fragility on complex datasets like CIFAR100 (sim1\% robustness for both). Resource efficiency analyses indicate that hybrid models consume less memory (4--5GB vs. 5--6GB for classical) and lower CPU utilization (9.5\% vs. 23.2\% on average).These results suggest that hybrid quantum-classical architectures offer compelling advantages in accuracy, training efficiency, and parameter scalability, particularly for complex vision tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13353 + Sun, 14 Sep 2025 09:55:00 +0000 - Saturation-Driven Dataset Generation for LLM Mathematical Reasoning in the TPTP Ecosystem - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06809 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06809.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Valentin Quesnel, Damien Sileo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The scarcity of high-quality, logically sound data is a critical bottleneck for advancing the mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our work confronts this challenge by turning decades of automated theorem proving research into a scalable data engine. Rather than relying on error-prone LLMs or complex proof-assistant syntax like Lean and Isabelle, our framework leverages E-prover's saturation capabilities on the vast TPTP axiom library to derive a massive, guaranteed-valid corpus of theorems. Our pipeline is principled and simple: saturate axioms, filter for "interesting" theorems, and generate tasks. With no LLMs in the loop, we eliminate factual errors by construction. This purely symbolic data is then transformed into three difficulty-controlled challenges: entailment verification, premise selection, and proof reconstruction. Our zero-shot experiments on frontier models reveal a clear weakness: performance collapses on tasks requiring deep, structural reasoning. Our framework provides both the diagnostic tool to measure this gap and a scalable source of symbolic training data to address it. We make the code and data publicly available. https://github.com/sileod/reasoning_core https://hf.co/datasets/reasoning-core/rc1</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06809 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:43:29 +0000 + PersonaX: Multimodal Datasets with LLM-Inferred Behavior Traits + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11362 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11362.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Loka Li, Wong Yu Kang, Minghao Fu, Guangyi Chen, Zhenhao Chen, Gongxu Luo, Yuewen Sun, Salman Khan, Peter Spirtes, Kun Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Understanding human behavior traits is central to applications in human-computer interaction, computational social science, and personalized AI systems. Such understanding often requires integrating multiple modalities to capture nuanced patterns and relationships. However, existing resources rarely provide datasets that combine behavioral descriptors with complementary modalities such as facial attributes and biographical information. To address this gap, we present PersonaX, a curated collection of multimodal datasets designed to enable comprehensive analysis of public traits across modalities. PersonaX consists of (1) CelebPersona, featuring 9444 public figures from diverse occupations, and (2) AthlePersona, covering 4181 professional athletes across 7 major sports leagues. Each dataset includes behavioral trait assessments inferred by three high-performing large language models, alongside facial imagery and structured biographical features. We analyze PersonaX at two complementary levels. First, we abstract high-level trait scores from text descriptions and apply five statistical independence tests to examine their relationships with other modalities. Second, we introduce a novel causal representation learning (CRL) framework tailored to multimodal and multi-measurement data, providing theoretical identifiability guarantees. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. By unifying structured and unstructured analysis, PersonaX establishes a foundation for studying LLM-inferred behavioral traits in conjunction with visual and biographical attributes, advancing multimodal trait analysis and causal reasoning.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11362 + Sun, 14 Sep 2025 17:30:03 +0000 - UMO: Scaling Multi-Identity Consistency for Image Customization via Matching Reward - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06818 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06818.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yufeng Cheng, Wenxu Wu, Shaojin Wu, Mengqi Huang, Fei Ding, Qian He</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 29</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advancements in image customization exhibit a wide range of application prospects due to stronger customization capabilities. However, since we humans are more sensitive to faces, a significant challenge remains in preserving consistent identity while avoiding identity confusion with multi-reference images, limiting the identity scalability of customization models. To address this, we present UMO, a Unified Multi-identity Optimization framework, designed to maintain high-fidelity identity preservation and alleviate identity confusion with scalability. With "multi-to-multi matching" paradigm, UMO reformulates multi-identity generation as a global assignment optimization problem and unleashes multi-identity consistency for existing image customization methods generally through reinforcement learning on diffusion models. To facilitate the training of UMO, we develop a scalable customization dataset with multi-reference images, consisting of both synthesised and real parts. Additionally, we propose a new metric to measure identity confusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMO not only improves identity consistency significantly, but also reduces identity confusion on several image customization methods, setting a new state-of-the-art among open-source methods along the dimension of identity preserving. Code and model: https://github.com/bytedance/UMO</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06818 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:54:55 +0000 + FuseCodec: Semantic-Contextual Fusion and Supervision for Neural Codecs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11425 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11425.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Md Mubtasim Ahasan, Rafat Hasan Khan, Tasnim Mohiuddin, Aman Chadha, Tariq Iqbal, M Ashraful Amin, Amin Ahsan Ali, Md Mofijul Islam, A K M Mahbubur Rahman</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Speech tokenization enables discrete representation and facilitates speech language modeling. However, existing neural codecs capture low-level acoustic features, overlooking the semantic and contextual cues inherent to human speech. While recent efforts introduced semantic representations from self-supervised speech models or incorporated contextual representations from pre-trained language models, challenges remain in aligning and unifying the semantic and contextual representations. We introduce FuseCodec, which unifies acoustic, semantic, and contextual representations through strong cross-modal alignment and globally informed supervision. We propose three complementary techniques: (i) Latent Representation Fusion, integrating semantic and contextual features directly into the encoder latent space for robust and unified representation learning; (ii) Global Semantic-Contextual Supervision, supervising discrete tokens with globally pooled and broadcasted representations to enhance temporal consistency and cross-modal alignment; and (iii) Temporally Aligned Contextual Supervision, strengthening alignment by dynamically matching contextual and speech tokens within a local window for fine-grained token-level supervision. We further introduce FuseCodec-TTS, demonstrating our methodology's applicability to zero-shot speech synthesis. Empirically, FuseCodec achieves state-of-the-art performance in LibriSpeech, surpassing EnCodec, SpeechTokenizer, and DAC in transcription accuracy, perceptual quality, intelligibility, and speaker similarity. Results highlight the effectiveness of contextually and semantically guided tokenization for speech tokenization and downstream tasks. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/mubtasimahasan/FuseCodec.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11425 + Sun, 14 Sep 2025 20:35:36 +0000 - Curia: A Multi-Modal Foundation Model for Radiology - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06830 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06830.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Corentin Dancette, Julien Khlaut, Antoine Saporta, Helene Philippe, Elodie Ferreres, Baptiste Callard, Théo Danielou, Léo Alberge, Léo Machado, Daniel Tordjman, Julie Dupuis, Korentin Le Floch, Jean Du Terrail, Mariam Moshiri, Laurent Dercle, Tom Boeken, Jules Gregory, Maxime Ronot, François Legou, Pascal Roux, Marc Sapoval, Pierre Manceron, Paul Hérent</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> AI-assisted radiological interpretation is based on predominantly narrow, single-task models. This approach is impractical for covering the vast spectrum of imaging modalities, diseases, and radiological findings. Foundation models (FMs) hold the promise of broad generalization across modalities and in low-data settings. However, this potential has remained largely unrealized in radiology. We introduce Curia, a foundation model trained on the entire cross-sectional imaging output of a major hospital over several years, which to our knowledge is the largest such corpus of real-world data-encompassing 150,000 exams (130 TB). On a newly curated 19-task external validation benchmark, Curia accurately identifies organs, detects conditions like brain hemorrhages and myocardial infarctions, and predicts outcomes in tumor staging. Curia meets or surpasses the performance of radiologists and recent foundation models, and exhibits clinically significant emergent properties in cross-modality, and low-data regimes. To accelerate progress, we release our base model's weights at https://huggingface.co/raidium/curia.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06830 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:04:12 +0000 + CognitiveSky: Scalable Sentiment and Narrative Analysis for Decentralized Social Media + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11444 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11444.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Gaurab Chhetri, Anandi Dutta, Subasish Das</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The emergence of decentralized social media platforms presents new opportunities and challenges for real-time analysis of public discourse. This study introduces CognitiveSky, an open-source and scalable framework designed for sentiment, emotion, and narrative analysis on Bluesky, a federated Twitter or X.com alternative. By ingesting data through Bluesky's Application Programming Interface (API), CognitiveSky applies transformer-based models to annotate large-scale user-generated content and produces structured and analyzable outputs. These summaries drive a dynamic dashboard that visualizes evolving patterns in emotion, activity, and conversation topics. Built entirely on free-tier infrastructure, CognitiveSky achieves both low operational cost and high accessibility. While demonstrated here for monitoring mental health discourse, its modular design enables applications across domains such as disinformation detection, crisis response, and civic sentiment analysis. By bridging large language models with decentralized networks, CognitiveSky offers a transparent, extensible tool for computational social science in an era of shifting digital ecosystems.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11444 + Sun, 14 Sep 2025 21:37:24 +0000 - Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning Models Is Not Effective for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks Yet - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06861 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06861.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> James Xu Zhao, Bryan Hooi, See-Kiong Ng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Test-time scaling increases inference-time computation by allowing models to generate long reasoning chains, and has shown strong performance across many domains. However, in this work, we show that this approach is not yet effective for knowledge-intensive tasks, where high factual accuracy and low hallucination rates are essential. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of test-time scaling using 12 reasoning models on two knowledge-intensive benchmarks. Our results reveal that increasing test-time computation does not consistently improve accuracy and, in many cases, it even leads to more hallucinations. We then analyze how extended reasoning affects hallucination behavior. We find that reduced hallucinations often result from the model choosing to abstain after thinking more, rather than from improved factual recall. Conversely, for some models, longer reasoning encourages attempts on previously unanswered questions, many of which result in hallucinations. Case studies show that extended reasoning can induce confirmation bias, leading to overconfident hallucinations. Despite these limitations, we observe that compared to non-thinking, enabling thinking remains beneficial. Code and data are available at https://github.com/XuZhao0/tts-knowledge</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06861 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:28:25 +0000 + Learning to Optimize Multi-Objective Alignment Through Dynamic Reward Weighting + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11452 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11452.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yining Lu, Zilong Wang, Shiyang Li, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Qingyu Yin, Zhan Shi, Zixuan Zhang, Meng Jiang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Prior works in multi-objective reinforcement learning typically use linear reward scalarization with fixed weights, which provably fail to capture non-convex Pareto fronts and thus yield suboptimal results. This limitation becomes especially critical in online preference alignment for large language models. Here, stochastic trajectories generated by parameterized policies create highly non-linear and non-convex mappings from parameters to objectives that no single static weighting scheme can find optimal trade-offs. We address this limitation by introducing dynamic reward weighting, which adaptively adjusts reward weights during the online reinforcement learning process. Unlike existing approaches that rely on fixed-weight interpolation, our dynamic weighting continuously balances and prioritizes objectives in training, facilitating effective exploration of Pareto fronts in objective space. We introduce two approaches of increasing sophistication and generalizability: (1) hypervolume-guided weight adaptation and (2) gradient-based weight optimization, offering a versatile toolkit for online multi-objective alignment. Our extensive experiments demonstrate their compatibility with commonly used online reinforcement learning algorithms (including GRPO, REINFORCE, and RLOO), effectiveness across multiple mathematical reasoning datasets, and applicability to different model families, consistently achieving Pareto dominant solutions with fewer training steps than fixed-weight linear scalarization baselines.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11452 + Sun, 14 Sep 2025 21:56:35 +0000 - The Majority is not always right: RL training for solution aggregation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06870 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06870.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wenting Zhao, Pranjal Aggarwal, Swarnadeep Saha, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Weston, Ilia Kulikov</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Scaling up test-time compute, by generating multiple independent solutions and selecting or aggregating among them, has become a central paradigm for improving large language models (LLMs) on challenging reasoning tasks. While most prior work relies on simple majority voting or reward model ranking to aggregate solutions, these approaches may only yield limited benefits. In this work, we propose to learn aggregation as an explicit reasoning skill: given a set of candidate solutions, we train an aggregator model to review, reconcile, and synthesize a final, correct answer using reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards. A key ingredient is careful balancing of easy and hard training examples, allowing the model to learn both to recover minority-but-correct answers as well as easy majority-correct answers. Empirically, we find our method, AggLM, outperforms both strong rule-based and reward-model baselines, across multiple benchmarks. Furthermore, it generalizes effectively to solutions from differing models, including stronger ones than contained in the training data, all while requiring substantially fewer tokens than majority voting with larger numbers of solutions.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06870 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:39:38 +0000 + RAPTOR: A Foundation Policy for Quadrotor Control + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11481 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11481.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jonas Eschmann, Dario Albani, Giuseppe Loianno</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Humans are remarkably data-efficient when adapting to new unseen conditions, like driving a new car. In contrast, modern robotic control systems, like neural network policies trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL), are highly specialized for single environments. Because of this overfitting, they are known to break down even under small differences like the Simulation-to-Reality (Sim2Real) gap and require system identification and retraining for even minimal changes to the system. In this work, we present RAPTOR, a method for training a highly adaptive foundation policy for quadrotor control. Our method enables training a single, end-to-end neural-network policy to control a wide variety of quadrotors. We test 10 different real quadrotors from 32 g to 2.4 kg that also differ in motor type (brushed vs. brushless), frame type (soft vs. rigid), propeller type (2/3/4-blade), and flight controller (PX4/Betaflight/Crazyflie/M5StampFly). We find that a tiny, three-layer policy with only 2084 parameters is sufficient for zero-shot adaptation to a wide variety of platforms. The adaptation through In-Context Learning is made possible by using a recurrence in the hidden layer. The policy is trained through a novel Meta-Imitation Learning algorithm, where we sample 1000 quadrotors and train a teacher policy for each of them using Reinforcement Learning. Subsequently, the 1000 teachers are distilled into a single, adaptive student policy. We find that within milliseconds, the resulting foundation policy adapts zero-shot to unseen quadrotors. We extensively test the capabilities of the foundation policy under numerous conditions (trajectory tracking, indoor/outdoor, wind disturbance, poking, different propellers).</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11481 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:05:40 +0000 - mmBERT: A Modern Multilingual Encoder with Annealed Language Learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06888 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06888.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Marc Marone, Orion Weller, William Fleshman, Eugene Yang, Dawn Lawrie, Benjamin Van Durme</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Encoder-only languages models are frequently used for a variety of standard machine learning tasks, including classification and retrieval. However, there has been a lack of recent research for encoder models, especially with respect to multilingual models. We introduce mmBERT, an encoder-only language model pretrained on 3T tokens of multilingual text in over 1800 languages. To build mmBERT we introduce several novel elements, including an inverse mask ratio schedule and an inverse temperature sampling ratio. We add over 1700 low-resource languages to the data mix only during the decay phase, showing that it boosts performance dramatically and maximizes the gains from the relatively small amount of training data. Despite only including these low-resource languages in the short decay phase we achieve similar classification performance to models like OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Overall, we show that mmBERT significantly outperforms the previous generation of models on classification and retrieval tasks -- on both high and low-resource languages.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06888 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:08:42 +0000 + ClaimIQ at CheckThat! 2025: Comparing Prompted and Fine-Tuned Language Models for Verifying Numerical Claims + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11492 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11492.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Anirban Saha Anik, Md Fahimul Kabir Chowdhury, Andrew Wyckoff, Sagnik Ray Choudhury</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper presents our system for Task 3 of the CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab, which focuses on verifying numerical and temporal claims using retrieved evidence. We explore two complementary approaches: zero-shot prompting with instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) and supervised fine-tuning using parameter-efficient LoRA. To enhance evidence quality, we investigate several selection strategies, including full-document input and top-k sentence filtering using BM25 and MiniLM. Our best-performing model LLaMA fine-tuned with LoRA achieves strong performance on the English validation set. However, a notable drop in the test set highlights a generalization challenge. These findings underscore the importance of evidence granularity and model adaptation for robust numerical fact verification.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11492 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:03:09 +0000 - Paper2Agent: Reimagining Research Papers As Interactive and Reliable AI Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06917 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06917.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiacheng Miao, Joe R. Davis, Jonathan K. Pritchard, James Zou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce Paper2Agent, an automated framework that converts research papers into AI agents. Paper2Agent transforms research output from passive artifacts into active systems that can accelerate downstream use, adoption, and discovery. Conventional research papers require readers to invest substantial effort to understand and adapt a paper's code, data, and methods to their own work, creating barriers to dissemination and reuse. Paper2Agent addresses this challenge by automatically converting a paper into an AI agent that acts as a knowledgeable research assistant. It systematically analyzes the paper and the associated codebase using multiple agents to construct a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, then iteratively generates and runs tests to refine and robustify the resulting MCP. These paper MCPs can then be flexibly connected to a chat agent (e.g. Claude Code) to carry out complex scientific queries through natural language while invoking tools and workflows from the original paper. We demonstrate Paper2Agent's effectiveness in creating reliable and capable paper agents through in-depth case studies. Paper2Agent created an agent that leverages AlphaGenome to interpret genomic variants and agents based on ScanPy and TISSUE to carry out single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analyses. We validate that these paper agents can reproduce the original paper's results and can correctly carry out novel user queries. By turning static papers into dynamic, interactive AI agents, Paper2Agent introduces a new paradigm for knowledge dissemination and a foundation for the collaborative ecosystem of AI co-scientists.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06917 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:28:42 +0000 + Multiple Instance Learning Framework with Masked Hard Instance Mining for Gigapixel Histopathology Image Analysis + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11526 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11526.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wenhao Tang, Sheng Huang, Heng Fang, Fengtao Zhou, Bo Liu, Qingshan Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Digitizing pathological images into gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs) has opened new avenues for Computational Pathology (CPath). As positive tissue comprises only a small fraction of gigapixel WSIs, existing Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods typically focus on identifying salient instances via attention mechanisms. However, this leads to a bias towards easy-to-classify instances while neglecting challenging ones. Recent studies have shown that hard examples are crucial for accurately modeling discriminative boundaries. Applying such an idea at the instance level, we elaborate a novel MIL framework with masked hard instance mining (MHIM-MIL), which utilizes a Siamese structure with a consistency constraint to explore the hard instances. Using a class-aware instance probability, MHIM-MIL employs a momentum teacher to mask salient instances and implicitly mine hard instances for training the student model. To obtain diverse, non-redundant hard instances, we adopt large-scale random masking while utilizing a global recycle network to mitigate the risk of losing key features. Furthermore, the student updates the teacher using an exponential moving average, which identifies new hard instances for subsequent training iterations and stabilizes optimization. Experimental results on cancer diagnosis, subtyping, survival analysis tasks, and 12 benchmarks demonstrate that MHIM-MIL outperforms the latest methods in both performance and efficiency. The code is available at: https://github.com/DearCaat/MHIM-MIL.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11526 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 02:31:33 +0000 - Staying in the Sweet Spot: Responsive Reasoning Evolution via Capability-Adaptive Hint Scaffolding - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06923 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06923.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ziheng Li, Zexu Sun, Jinman Zhao, Erxue Min, Yongcheng Zeng, Hui Wu, Hengyi Cai, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xu Chen, Zhi-Hong Deng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 20</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLVR methods often suffer from exploration inefficiency due to mismatches between the training data's difficulty and the model's capability. LLMs fail to discover viable reasoning paths when problems are overly difficult, while learning little new capability when problems are too simple. In this work, we formalize the impact of problem difficulty by quantifying the relationship between loss descent speed and rollout accuracy. Building on this analysis, we propose SEELE, a novel supervision-aided RLVR framework that dynamically adjusts problem difficulty to stay within the high-efficiency region. SEELE augments each training sample by appending a hint (part of a full solution) after the original problem. Unlike previous hint-based approaches, SEELE deliberately and adaptively adjusts the hint length for each problem to achieve an optimal difficulty. To determine the optimal hint length, SEELE employs a multi-round rollout sampling strategy. In each round, it fits an item response theory model to the accuracy-hint pairs collected in preceding rounds to predict the required hint length for the next round. This instance-level, real-time difficulty adjustment aligns problem difficulty with the evolving model capability, thereby improving exploration efficiency. Experimental results show that SEELE outperforms Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) by +11.8 and +10.5 points, respectively, and surpasses the best previous supervision-aided approach by +3.6 points on average across six math reasoning benchmarks.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06923 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:36:21 +0000 + UI-S1: Advancing GUI Automation via Semi-online Reinforcement Learning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11543 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11543.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhengxi Lu, Jiabo Ye, Fei Tang, Yongliang Shen, Haiyang Xu, Ziwei Zheng, Weiming Lu, Ming Yan, Fei Huang, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 43</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions through reinforcement learning. However, current approaches face a fundamental dilemma: offline RL enables stable training on pre-collected trajectories, but struggles with multi-step task execution for lack of trajectory-level reward signals; online RL captures these signals through environment interaction, but suffers from sparse rewards and prohibitive deployment costs. To address it, we present Semi-online Reinforcement Learning, a novel paradigm that simulates online RL on offline trajectories. During each rollout process, we preserve the original model output within the multi-turn dialogue, where a Patch Module adaptively recovers the divergence between rollout and expert trajectories. To capture long-term training signals, Semi-online RL introduces discounted future returns into the reward computation and optimizes the policy with weighted step-level and episode-level advantages. We further introduce Semi-Online Performance (SOP), a metric that aligns better with true online performance, serving as a practical and effective proxy for real-world evaluation. Experiments show that ours Semi-online RL achieves SOTA performance among 7B models across four dynamic benchmarks, with significant gains over the base model (e.g., +12.0% on AndroidWorld, +23.8% on AITW), demonstrating significant progress in bridging the gap between offline training efficiency and online multi-turn reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent/tree/main/UI-S1.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11543 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 03:24:08 +0000 - Statistical Methods in Generative AI - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07054 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07054.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Edgar Dobriban</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Generative Artificial Intelligence is emerging as an important technology, promising to be transformative in many areas. At the same time, generative AI techniques are based on sampling from probabilistic models, and by default, they come with no guarantees about correctness, safety, fairness, or other properties. Statistical methods offer a promising potential approach to improve the reliability of generative AI techniques. In addition, statistical methods are also promising for improving the quality and efficiency of AI evaluation, as well as for designing interventions and experiments in AI. In this paper, we review some of the existing work on these topics, explaining both the general statistical techniques used, as well as their applications to generative AI. We also discuss limitations and potential future directions.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07054 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:42:59 +0000 + EthicsMH: A Pilot Benchmark for Ethical Reasoning in Mental Health AI + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11648 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11648.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sai Kartheek Reddy Kasu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in mental health and other sensitive domains raises urgent questions about ethical reasoning, fairness, and responsible alignment. Yet, existing benchmarks for moral and clinical decision-making do not adequately capture the unique ethical dilemmas encountered in mental health practice, where confidentiality, autonomy, beneficence, and bias frequently intersect. To address this gap, we introduce Ethical Reasoning in Mental Health (EthicsMH), a pilot dataset of 125 scenarios designed to evaluate how AI systems navigate ethically charged situations in therapeutic and psychiatric contexts. Each scenario is enriched with structured fields, including multiple decision options, expert-aligned reasoning, expected model behavior, real-world impact, and multi-stakeholder viewpoints. This structure enables evaluation not only of decision accuracy but also of explanation quality and alignment with professional norms. Although modest in scale and developed with model-assisted generation, EthicsMH establishes a task framework that bridges AI ethics and mental health decision-making. By releasing this dataset, we aim to provide a seed resource that can be expanded through community and expert contributions, fostering the development of AI systems capable of responsibly handling some of society's most delicate decisions.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11648 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 07:35:35 +0000 - From Noise to Narrative: Tracing the Origins of Hallucinations in Transformers - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06938 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06938.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Praneet Suresh, Jack Stanley, Sonia Joseph, Luca Scimeca, Danilo Bzdok</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> As generative AI systems become competent and democratized in science, business, and government, deeper insight into their failure modes now poses an acute need. The occasional volatility in their behavior, such as the propensity of transformer models to hallucinate, impedes trust and adoption of emerging AI solutions in high-stakes areas. In the present work, we establish how and when hallucinations arise in pre-trained transformer models through concept representations captured by sparse autoencoders, under scenarios with experimentally controlled uncertainty in the input space. Our systematic experiments reveal that the number of semantic concepts used by the transformer model grows as the input information becomes increasingly unstructured. In the face of growing uncertainty in the input space, the transformer model becomes prone to activate coherent yet input-insensitive semantic features, leading to hallucinated output. At its extreme, for pure-noise inputs, we identify a wide variety of robustly triggered and meaningful concepts in the intermediate activations of pre-trained transformer models, whose functional integrity we confirm through targeted steering. We also show that hallucinations in the output of a transformer model can be reliably predicted from the concept patterns embedded in transformer layer activations. This collection of insights on transformer internal processing mechanics has immediate consequences for aligning AI models with human values, AI safety, opening the attack surface for potential adversarial attacks, and providing a basis for automatic quantification of a model's hallucination risk.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06938 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:50:45 +0000 + Dr.V: A Hierarchical Perception-Temporal-Cognition Framework to Diagnose Video Hallucination by Fine-grained Spatial-Temporal Grounding + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11866 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11866.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Meng Luo, Shengqiong Wu, Liqiang Jing, Tianjie Ju, Li Zheng, Jinxiang Lai, Tianlong Wu, Xinya Du, Jian Li, Siyuan Yan, Jiebo Luo, William Yang Wang, Hao Fei, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advancements in large video models (LVMs) have significantly enhance video understanding. However, these models continue to suffer from hallucinations, producing content that conflicts with input videos. To address this issue, we propose Dr.V, a hierarchical framework covering perceptive, temporal, and cognitive levels to diagnose video hallucination by fine-grained spatial-temporal grounding. Dr.V comprises of two key components: a benchmark dataset Dr.V-Bench and a satellite video agent Dr.V-Agent. Dr.V-Bench includes 10k instances drawn from 4,974 videos spanning diverse tasks, each enriched with detailed spatial-temporal annotation. Dr.V-Agent detects hallucinations in LVMs by systematically applying fine-grained spatial-temporal grounding at the perceptive and temporal levels, followed by cognitive level reasoning. This step-by-step pipeline mirrors human-like video comprehension and effectively identifies hallucinations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dr.V-Agent is effective in diagnosing hallucination while enhancing interpretability and reliability, offering a practical blueprint for robust video understanding in real-world scenarios. All our data and code are available at https://github.com/Eurekaleo/Dr.V.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11866 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 12:39:19 +0000 - Directly Aligning the Full Diffusion Trajectory with Fine-Grained Human Preference - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06942 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06942.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiangwei Shen, Zhimin Li, Zhantao Yang, Shiyi Zhang, Yingfang Zhang, Donghao Li, Chunyu Wang, Qinglin Lu, Yansong Tang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of directly aligning diffusion models with human preferences using differentiable reward. However, they exhibit two primary challenges: (1) they rely on multistep denoising with gradient computation for reward scoring, which is computationally expensive, thus restricting optimization to only a few diffusion steps; (2) they often need continuous offline adaptation of reward models in order to achieve desired aesthetic quality, such as photorealism or precise lighting effects. To address the limitation of multistep denoising, we propose Direct-Align, a method that predefines a noise prior to effectively recover original images from any time steps via interpolation, leveraging the equation that diffusion states are interpolations between noise and target images, which effectively avoids over-optimization in late timesteps. Furthermore, we introduce Semantic Relative Preference Optimization (SRPO), in which rewards are formulated as text-conditioned signals. This approach enables online adjustment of rewards in response to positive and negative prompt augmentation, thereby reducing the reliance on offline reward fine-tuning. By fine-tuning the FLUX.1.dev model with optimized denoising and online reward adjustment, we improve its human-evaluated realism and aesthetic quality by over 3x.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06942 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:54:08 +0000 + ToolRM: Outcome Reward Models for Tool-Calling Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11963 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11963.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mayank Agarwal, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Kinjal Basu, Merve Unuvar, Luis A. Lastras, Yara Rizk, Pavan Kapanipathi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> As large language models (LLMs) increasingly interact with external tools, reward modeling for tool use has become a critical yet underexplored area. Existing reward models, trained primarily on natural language outputs, struggle to evaluate tool-based reasoning and execution. To quantify this gap, we introduce FC-RewardBench, the first benchmark designed to systematically assess reward models' performance in tool-calling scenarios. Our analysis shows that current reward models often miss key signals of effective tool use, highlighting the need for domain-specific modeling. To address this, we propose a training framework for outcome-based reward models using data synthesized from permissively licensed, open-weight LLMs. We train models ranging from 1.7B to 14B parameters and evaluate them across seven out-of-domain benchmarks. These models consistently outperform general-purpose baselines, achieving up to 25\% average improvement in downstream task performance and enabling data-efficient fine-tuning through reward-guided filtering.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11963 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 14:17:17 +0000 - Interleaving Reasoning for Better Text-to-Image Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06945 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06945.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wenxuan Huang, Shuang Chen, Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Shixiang Tang, Yufan Shen, Qingyu Yin, Wenbo Hu, Xiaoman Wang, Yuntian Tang, Junbo Qiao, Yue Guo, Yao Hu, Zhenfei Yin, Philip Torr, Yu Cheng, Wanli Ouyang, Shaohui Lin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Unified multimodal understanding and generation models recently have achieve significant improvement in image generation capability, yet a large gap remains in instruction following and detail preservation compared to systems that tightly couple comprehension with generation such as GPT-4o. Motivated by recent advances in interleaving reasoning, we explore whether such reasoning can further improve Text-to-Image (T2I) generation. We introduce Interleaving Reasoning Generation (IRG), a framework that alternates between text-based thinking and image synthesis: the model first produces a text-based thinking to guide an initial image, then reflects on the result to refine fine-grained details, visual quality, and aesthetics while preserving semantics. To train IRG effectively, we propose Interleaving Reasoning Generation Learning (IRGL), which targets two sub-goals: (1) strengthening the initial think-and-generate stage to establish core content and base quality, and (2) enabling high-quality textual reflection and faithful implementation of those refinements in a subsequent image. We curate IRGL-300K, a dataset organized into six decomposed learning modes that jointly cover learning text-based thinking, and full thinking-image trajectories. Starting from a unified foundation model that natively emits interleaved text-image outputs, our two-stage training first builds robust thinking and reflection, then efficiently tunes the IRG pipeline in the full thinking-image trajectory data. Extensive experiments show SoTA performance, yielding absolute gains of 5-10 points on GenEval, WISE, TIIF, GenAI-Bench, and OneIG-EN, alongside substantial improvements in visual quality and fine-grained fidelity. The code, model weights and datasets will be released in: https://github.com/Osilly/Interleaving-Reasoning-Generation .</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06945 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:56:23 +0000 + Lost in Embeddings: Information Loss in Vision-Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11986 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.11986.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wenyan Li, Raphael Tang, Chengzu Li, Caiqi Zhang, Ivan Vulić, Anders Søgaard</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision--language models (VLMs) often process visual inputs through a pretrained vision encoder, followed by a projection into the language model's embedding space via a connector component. While crucial for modality fusion, the potential information loss induced by this projection step and its direct impact on model capabilities remain understudied. We introduce two complementary approaches to examine and quantify this loss by analyzing the latent representation space. First, we evaluate semantic information preservation by analyzing changes in k-nearest neighbor relationships between image representations, before and after projection. Second, we directly measure information loss by reconstructing visual embeddings from the projected representation, localizing loss at an image patch level. Experiments reveal that connectors substantially distort the local geometry of visual representations, with k-nearest neighbors diverging by 40--60\% post-projection, correlating with degradation in retrieval performance. The patch-level embedding reconstruction provides interpretable insights for model behavior on visually grounded question-answering tasks, finding that areas of high information loss reliably predict instances where models struggle.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11986 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 14:38:06 +0000 - Revolutionizing Reinforcement Learning Framework for Diffusion Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06949 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06949.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yinjie Wang, Ling Yang, Bowen Li, Ye Tian, Ke Shen, Mengdi Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 51</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We propose TraceRL, a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning framework for diffusion language models (DLMs) that incorporates preferred inference trajectory into post-training, and is applicable across different architectures. Equipped with a diffusion-based value model that enhances training stability, we demonstrate improved reasoning performance on complex math and coding tasks. Besides, it can also be applied to adapt block-specific models to larger blocks, which improves sampling flexibility. Employing TraceRL, we derive a series of state-of-the-art diffusion language models, namely TraDo. Although smaller than 7B-scale AR models, TraDo-4B-Instruct still consistently outperforms them across complex math reasoning tasks. TraDo-8B-Instruct achieves relative accuracy improvements of 6.1% over Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and 51.3% over Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Through curriculum learning, we also derive the first long-CoT DLM, outperforming Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on MATH500 with an 18.1% relative accuracy gain. To facilitate reproducible research and practical applications, we release a comprehensive open-source framework for building, training, and deploying diffusion LLMs across diverse architectures. The framework integrates accelerated KV-cache techniques and inference engines for both inference and reinforcement learning, and includes implementations of various supervised fine-tuning and RL methods for mathematics, coding, and general tasks. Code and Models: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/dLLM-RL</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06949 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:58:06 +0000 + Look Again, Think Slowly: Enhancing Visual Reflection in Vision-Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12132 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12132.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pu Jian, Junhong Wu, Wei Sun, Chen Wang, Shuo Ren, Jiajun Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in text-only "slow-thinking" reasoning have prompted efforts to transfer this capability to vision-language models (VLMs), for training visual reasoning models (VRMs). owever, such transfer faces critical challenges: Effective "slow thinking" in VRMs requires visual reflection, the ability to check the reasoning process based on visual information. Through quantitative analysis, we observe that current VRMs exhibit limited visual reflection, as their attention to visual information diminishes rapidly with longer generated responses. To address this challenge, we propose a new VRM Reflection-V, which enhances visual reflection based on reasoning data construction for cold-start and reward design for reinforcement learning (RL). Firstly, we construct vision-centered reasoning data by leveraging an agent that interacts between VLMs and reasoning LLMs, enabling cold-start learning of visual reflection patterns. Secondly, a visual attention based reward model is employed during RL to encourage reasoning based on visual information. Therefore, Reflection-V demonstrates significant improvements across multiple visual reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, Reflection-V maintains a stronger and more consistent reliance on visual information during visual reasoning, indicating effective enhancement in visual reflection capabilities.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12132 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 16:57:25 +0000 - F1: A Vision-Language-Action Model Bridging Understanding and Generation to Actions - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06951 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.06951.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Qi Lv, Weijie Kong, Hao Li, Jia Zeng, Zherui Qiu, Delin Qu, Haoming Song, Qizhi Chen, Xiang Deng, Jiangmiao Pang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 29</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Executing language-conditioned tasks in dynamic visual environments remains a central challenge in embodied AI. Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly adopt reactive state-to-action mappings, often leading to short-sighted behaviors and poor robustness in dynamic scenes. In this paper, we introduce F1, a pretrained VLA framework which integrates the visual foresight generation into decision-making pipeline. F1 adopts a Mixture-of-Transformer architecture with dedicated modules for perception, foresight generation, and control, thereby bridging understanding, generation, and actions. At its core, F1 employs a next-scale prediction mechanism to synthesize goal-conditioned visual foresight as explicit planning targets. By forecasting plausible future visual states, F1 reformulates action generation as a foresight-guided inverse dynamics problem, enabling actions that implicitly achieve visual goals. To endow F1 with robust and generalizable capabilities, we propose a three-stage training recipe on an extensive dataset comprising over 330k trajectories across 136 diverse tasks. This training scheme enhances modular reasoning and equips the model with transferable visual foresight, which is critical for complex and dynamic environments. Extensive evaluations on real-world tasks and simulation benchmarks demonstrate F1 consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving substantial gains in both task success rate and generalization ability.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06951 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:58:30 +0000 + OmniWorld: A Multi-Domain and Multi-Modal Dataset for 4D World Modeling + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12201 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12201.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yang Zhou, Yifan Wang, Jianjun Zhou, Wenzheng Chang, Haoyu Guo, Zizun Li, Kaijing Ma, Xinyue Li, Yating Wang, Haoyi Zhu, Mingyu Liu, Dingning Liu, Jiange Yang, Zhoujie Fu, Junyi Chen, Chunhua Shen, Jiangmiao Pang, Kaipeng Zhang, Tong He</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 98</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The field of 4D world modeling - aiming to jointly capture spatial geometry and temporal dynamics - has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, driven by advances in large-scale generative models and multimodal learning. However, the development of truly general 4D world models remains fundamentally constrained by the availability of high-quality data. Existing datasets and benchmarks often lack the dynamic complexity, multi-domain diversity, and spatial-temporal annotations required to support key tasks such as 4D geometric reconstruction, future prediction, and camera-control video generation. To address this gap, we introduce OmniWorld, a large-scale, multi-domain, multi-modal dataset specifically designed for 4D world modeling. OmniWorld consists of a newly collected OmniWorld-Game dataset and several curated public datasets spanning diverse domains. Compared with existing synthetic datasets, OmniWorld-Game provides richer modality coverage, larger scale, and more realistic dynamic interactions. Based on this dataset, we establish a challenging benchmark that exposes the limitations of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in modeling complex 4D environments. Moreover, fine-tuning existing SOTA methods on OmniWorld leads to significant performance gains across 4D reconstruction and video generation tasks, strongly validating OmniWorld as a powerful resource for training and evaluation. We envision OmniWorld as a catalyst for accelerating the development of general-purpose 4D world models, ultimately advancing machines' holistic understanding of the physical world.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12201 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:59:19 +0000 - All You Need Is A Fuzzing Brain: An LLM-Powered System for Automated Vulnerability Detection and Patching - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07225 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07225.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ze Sheng, Qingxiao Xu, Jianwei Huang, Matthew Woodcock, Heqing Huang, Alastair F. Donaldson, Guofei Gu, Jeff Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Our team, All You Need Is A Fuzzing Brain, was one of seven finalists in DARPA's Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), placing fourth in the final round. During the competition, we developed a Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) that autonomously discovered 28 security vulnerabilities - including six previously unknown zero-days - in real-world open-source C and Java projects, and successfully patched 14 of them. The complete CRS is open source at https://github.com/o2lab/afc-crs-all-you-need-is-a-fuzzing-brain. This paper provides a detailed technical description of our CRS, with an emphasis on its LLM-powered components and strategies. Building on AIxCC, we further introduce a public leaderboard for benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs on vulnerability detection and patching tasks, derived from the AIxCC dataset. The leaderboard is available at https://o2lab.github.io/FuzzingBrain-Leaderboard/.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07225 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:08:01 +0000 + LazyDrag: Enabling Stable Drag-Based Editing on Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers via Explicit Correspondence + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12203 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12203.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zixin Yin, Xili Dai, Duomin Wang, Xianfang Zeng, Lionel M. Ni, Gang Yu, Heung-Yeung Shum</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The reliance on implicit point matching via attention has become a core bottleneck in drag-based editing, resulting in a fundamental compromise on weakened inversion strength and costly test-time optimization (TTO). This compromise severely limits the generative capabilities of diffusion models, suppressing high-fidelity inpainting and text-guided creation. In this paper, we introduce LazyDrag, the first drag-based image editing method for Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers, which directly eliminates the reliance on implicit point matching. In concrete terms, our method generates an explicit correspondence map from user drag inputs as a reliable reference to boost the attention control. This reliable reference opens the potential for a stable full-strength inversion process, which is the first in the drag-based editing task. It obviates the necessity for TTO and unlocks the generative capability of models. Therefore, LazyDrag naturally unifies precise geometric control with text guidance, enabling complex edits that were previously out of reach: opening the mouth of a dog and inpainting its interior, generating new objects like a ``tennis ball'', or for ambiguous drags, making context-aware changes like moving a hand into a pocket. Additionally, LazyDrag supports multi-round workflows with simultaneous move and scale operations. Evaluated on the DragBench, our method outperforms baselines in drag accuracy and perceptual quality, as validated by VIEScore and human evaluation. LazyDrag not only establishes new state-of-the-art performance, but also paves a new way to editing paradigms.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12203 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:59:47 +0000 - Benchmarking Information Retrieval Models on Complex Retrieval Tasks - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07253 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07253.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Julian Killingback, Hamed Zamani</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) are incredible and versatile tools for text-based tasks that have enabled countless, previously unimaginable, applications. Retrieval models, in contrast, have not yet seen such capable general-purpose models emerge. To achieve this goal, retrieval models must be able to perform complex retrieval tasks, where queries contain multiple parts, constraints, or requirements in natural language. These tasks represent a natural progression from the simple, single-aspect queries that are used in the vast majority of existing, commonly used evaluation sets. Complex queries naturally arise as people expect search systems to handle more specific and often ambitious information requests, as is demonstrated by how people use LLM-based information systems. Despite the growing desire for retrieval models to expand their capabilities in complex retrieval tasks, there exist limited resources to assess the ability of retrieval models on a comprehensive set of diverse complex tasks. The few resources that do exist feature a limited scope and often lack realistic settings making it hard to know the true capabilities of retrieval models on complex real-world retrieval tasks. To address this shortcoming and spur innovation in next-generation retrieval models, we construct a diverse and realistic set of complex retrieval tasks and benchmark a representative set of state-of-the-art retrieval models. Additionally, we explore the impact of LLM-based query expansion and rewriting on retrieval quality. Our results show that even the best models struggle to produce high-quality retrieval results with the highest average nDCG@10 of only 0.346 and R@100 of only 0.587 across all tasks. Although LLM augmentation can help weaker models, the strongest model has decreased performance across all metrics with all rewriting techniques.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07253 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 22:11:10 +0000 + Exact Coset Sampling for Quantum Lattice Algorithms + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12341 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12341.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yifan Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We give a simple, fully correct, and assumption-light replacement for the contested "domain-extension" in Step 9 of a recent windowed-QFT lattice algorithm with complex-Gaussian windows~chen2024quantum. The published Step~9 suffers from a periodicity/support mismatch. We present a pair-shift difference construction that coherently cancels all unknown offsets, produces an exact uniform CRT-coset state over Z_{P}, and then uses the QFT to enforce the intended modular linear relation. The unitary is reversible, uses poly(log M_2) gates, and preserves the algorithm's asymptotics. Project Page: https://github.com/yifanzhang-pro/quantum-lattice.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12341 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:10:28 +0000 - Reconstruction Alignment Improves Unified Multimodal Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07295 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07295.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ji Xie, Trevor Darrell, Luke Zettlemoyer, XuDong Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 38</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Unified multimodal models (UMMs) unify visual understanding and generation within a single architecture. However, conventional training relies on image-text pairs (or sequences) whose captions are typically sparse and miss fine-grained visual details--even when they use hundreds of words to describe a simple image. We introduce Reconstruction Alignment (RecA), a resource-efficient post-training method that leverages visual understanding encoder embeddings as dense "text prompts," providing rich supervision without captions. Concretely, RecA conditions a UMM on its own visual understanding embeddings and optimizes it to reconstruct the input image with a self-supervised reconstruction loss, thereby realigning understanding and generation. Despite its simplicity, RecA is broadly applicable: across autoregressive, masked-autoregressive, and diffusion-based UMMs, it consistently improves generation and editing fidelity. With only 27 GPU-hours, post-training with RecA substantially improves image generation performance on GenEval (0.73rightarrow0.90) and DPGBench (80.93rightarrow88.15), while also boosting editing benchmarks (ImgEdit 3.38rightarrow3.75, GEdit 6.94rightarrow7.25). Notably, RecA surpasses much larger open-source models and applies broadly across diverse UMM architectures, establishing it as an efficient and general post-training alignment strategy for UMMs</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07295 - Mon, 08 Sep 2025 23:59:32 +0000 + Image Tokenizer Needs Post-Training + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12474 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12474.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kai Qiu, Xiang Li, Hao Chen, Jason Kuen, Xiaohao Xu, Jiuxiang Gu, Yinyi Luo, Bhiksha Raj, Zhe Lin, Marios Savvides</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent image generative models typically capture the image distribution in a pre-constructed latent space, relying on a frozen image tokenizer. However, there exists a significant discrepancy between the reconstruction and generation distribution, where current tokenizers only prioritize the reconstruction task that happens before generative training without considering the generation errors during sampling. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the reason for this discrepancy in a discrete latent space, and, from which, we propose a novel tokenizer training scheme including both main-training and post-training, focusing on improving latent space construction and decoding respectively. During the main training, a latent perturbation strategy is proposed to simulate sampling noises, \ie, the unexpected tokens generated in generative inference. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play tokenizer training scheme, which significantly enhances the robustness of tokenizer, thus boosting the generation quality and convergence speed, and a novel tokenizer evaluation metric, \ie, pFID, which successfully correlates the tokenizer performance to generation quality. During post-training, we further optimize the tokenizer decoder regarding a well-trained generative model to mitigate the distribution difference between generated and reconstructed tokens. With a sim400M generator, a discrete tokenizer trained with our proposed main training achieves a notable 1.60 gFID and further obtains 1.36 gFID with the additional post-training. Further experiments are conducted to broadly validate the effectiveness of our post-training strategy on off-the-shelf discrete and continuous tokenizers, coupled with autoregressive and diffusion-based generators.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12474 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 21:38:03 +0000 - Causal Attention with Lookahead Keys - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07301 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07301.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhuoqing Song, Peng Sun, Huizhuo Yuan, Quanquan Gu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 17</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In standard causal attention, each token's query, key, and value (QKV) are static and encode only preceding context. We introduce CAuSal aTtention with Lookahead kEys (CASTLE), an attention mechanism that continually updates each token's keys as the context unfolds. We term these updated keys lookahead keys because they belong to earlier positions yet integrate information from tokens that appear later relative to those positions, while strictly preserving the autoregressive property. Although the mechanism appears sequential, we derive a mathematical equivalence that avoids explicitly materializing lookahead keys at each position and enables efficient parallel training. On language modeling benchmarks, CASTLE consistently outperforms standard causal attention across model scales, reducing validation perplexity and improving performance on a range of downstream tasks.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07301 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:15:23 +0000 + Phi: Preference Hijacking in Multi-modal Large Language Models at Inference Time + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12521 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12521.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yifan Lan, Yuanpu Cao, Weitong Zhang, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention across various domains. However, their widespread adoption has also raised serious safety concerns. In this paper, we uncover a new safety risk of MLLMs: the output preference of MLLMs can be arbitrarily manipulated by carefully optimized images. Such attacks often generate contextually relevant yet biased responses that are neither overtly harmful nor unethical, making them difficult to detect. Specifically, we introduce a novel method, Preference Hijacking (Phi), for manipulating the MLLM response preferences using a preference hijacked image. Our method works at inference time and requires no model modifications. Additionally, we introduce a universal hijacking perturbation -- a transferable component that can be embedded into different images to hijack MLLM responses toward any attacker-specified preferences. Experimental results across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code for Phi is accessible at https://github.com/Yifan-Lan/Phi.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12521 + Mon, 15 Sep 2025 23:55:57 +0000 - Language Self-Play For Data-Free Training - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07414 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07414.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jakub Grudzien Kuba, Mengting Gu, Qi Ma, Yuandong Tian, Vijai Mohan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly in recent years, driven by scale, abundant high-quality training data, and reinforcement learning. Yet this progress faces a fundamental bottleneck: the need for ever more data from which models can continue to learn. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning approach that removes this dependency by enabling models to improve without additional data. Our method leverages a game-theoretic framework of self-play, where a model's capabilities are cast as performance in a competitive game and stronger policies emerge by having the model play against itself - a process we call Language Self-Play (LSP). Experiments with Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct on instruction-following benchmarks show that pretrained models can not only enhance their performance on challenging tasks through self-play alone, but can also do so more effectively than data-driven baselines.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07414 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 05:51:34 +0000 + zELO: ELO-inspired Training Method for Rerankers and Embedding Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12541 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12541.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Nicholas Pipitone, Ghita Houir Alami, Advaith Avadhanam, Anton Kaminskyi, Ashley Khoo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce a novel training methodology named zELO, which optimizes retrieval performance via the analysis that ranking tasks are statically equivalent to a Thurstone model. Based on the zELO method, we use unsupervised data in order train a suite of state-of-the-art open-weight reranker models: zerank-1 and zerank-1-small. These models achieve the highest retrieval scores in multiple domains, including finance, legal, code, and STEM, outperforming closed-source proprietary rerankers on both NDCG@10 and Recall. These models also demonstrate great versatility, maintaining their 0-shot performance on out-of-domain and private customer datasets. The training data included 112,000 queries and 100 documents per query, and was trained end-to-end from unannotated queries and documents in less than 10,000 H100-hours.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12541 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:44:08 +0000 - The Choice of Divergence: A Neglected Key to Mitigating Diversity Collapse in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07430 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07430.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Long Li, Jiaran Hao, Jason Klein Liu, Zhijian Zhou, Xiaoyu Tan, Wei Chu, Zhe Wang, Shirui Pan, Chao Qu, Yuan Qi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> A central paradox in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is the frequent degradation of multi-attempt performance (Pass@k) despite improvements in single-attempt accuracy (Pass@1). This is often accompanied by catastrophic forgetting, where models lose previously acquired skills. While various methods have been proposed, the choice and function of the divergence term have been surprisingly unexamined as a proactive solution. We argue that standard RLVR objectives -- both those using the mode-seeking reverse KL-divergence and those forgoing a divergence term entirely -- lack a crucial mechanism for knowledge retention. The reverse-KL actively accelerates this decay by narrowing the policy, while its absence provides no safeguard against the model drifting from its diverse knowledge base. We propose a fundamental shift in perspective: using the divergence term itself as the solution. Our framework, Diversity-Preserving Hybrid RL (DPH-RL), leverages mass-covering f-divergences (like forward-KL and JS-divergence) to function as a rehearsal mechanism. By continuously referencing the initial policy, this approach forces the model to maintain broad solution coverage. Extensive experiments on math and SQL generation demonstrate that DPH-RL not only resolves the Pass@k degradation but improves both Pass@1 and Pass@k in- and out-of-domain. Additionally, DPH-RL is more training-efficient because it computes f-divergence using generator functions, requiring only sampling from the initial policy and no online reference model. Our work highlights a crucial, overlooked axis for improving RLVR, demonstrating that the proper selection of a divergence measure is a powerful tool for building more general and diverse reasoning models.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07430 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 06:34:32 +0000 + EconProver: Towards More Economical Test-Time Scaling for Automated Theorem Proving + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12603 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12603.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mukai Li, Linfeng Song, Zhenwen Liang, Jiahao Xu, Shansan Gong, Qi Liu, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP), attaining substantial performance gains through widely adopted test-time scaling strategies, notably reflective Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and increased sampling passes. However, they both introduce significant computational overhead for inference. Moreover, existing cost analyses typically regulate only the number of sampling passes, while neglecting the substantial disparities in sampling costs introduced by different scaling strategies. In this paper, we systematically compare the efficiency of different test-time scaling strategies for ATP models and demonstrate the inefficiency of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source approaches. We then investigate approaches to significantly reduce token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. Specifically, we propose two complementary methods that can be integrated into a unified EconRL pipeline for amplified benefits: (1) a dynamic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) switching mechanism designed to mitigate unnecessary token consumption, and (2) Diverse parallel-scaled reinforcement learning (RL) with trainable prefixes to enhance pass rates under constrained sampling passes. Experiments on miniF2F and ProofNet demonstrate that our EconProver achieves comparable performance to baseline methods with only 12% of the computational cost. This work provides actionable insights for deploying lightweight ATP models without sacrificing performance.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12603 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 03:00:13 +0000 - ΔL Normalization: Rethink Loss Aggregation in RLVR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07558 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07558.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhiyuan He, Xufang Luo, Yike Zhang, Yuqing Yang, Lili Qiu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We propose Delta L Normalization, a simple yet effective loss aggregation method tailored to the characteristic of dynamic generation lengths in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). Recently, RLVR has demonstrated strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but a major challenge lies in the large variability of response lengths during training, which leads to high gradient variance and unstable optimization. Although previous methods such as GRPO, DAPO, and Dr. GRPO introduce different loss normalization terms to address this issue, they either produce biased estimates or still suffer from high gradient variance. By analyzing the effect of varying lengths on policy loss both theoretically and empirically, we reformulate the problem as finding a minimum-variance unbiased estimator. Our proposed Delta L Normalization not only provides an unbiased estimate of the true policy loss but also minimizes gradient variance in theory. Extensive experiments show that it consistently achieves superior results across different model sizes, maximum lengths, and tasks. Our code will be made public at https://github.com/zerolllin/Delta-L-Normalization.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07558 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:52:34 +0000 + Hunyuan3D Studio: End-to-End AI Pipeline for Game-Ready 3D Asset Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12815 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12815.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Biwen Lei, Yang Li, Xinhai Liu, Shuhui Yang, Lixin Xu, Jingwei Huang, Ruining Tang, Haohan Weng, Jian Liu, Jing Xu, Zhen Zhou, Yiling Zhu, Jiankai Xing, Jiachen Xu, Changfeng Ma, Xinhao Yan, Yunhan Yang, Chunshi Wang, Duoteng Xu, Xueqi Ma, Yuguang Chen, Jing Li, Mingxin Yang, Sheng Zhang, Yifei Feng, Xin Huang, Di Luo, Zebin He, Puhua Jiang, Changrong Hu, Zihan Qin, Shiwei Miao, Haolin Liu, Yunfei Zhao, Zeqiang Lai, Qingxiang Lin, Zibo Zhao, Kunhong Li, Xianghui Yang, Huiwen Shi, Xin Yang, Yuxuan Wang, Zebin Yao, Yihang Lian, Sicong Liu, Xintong Han, Wangchen Qin, Caisheng Ouyang, Jianyin Liu, Tianwen Yuan, Shuai Jiang, Hong Duan, Yanqi Niu, Wencong Lin, Yifu Sun, Shirui Huang, Lin Niu, Gu Gong, Guojian Xiao, Bojian Zheng, Xiang Yuan, Qi Chen, Jie Xiao, Dongyang Zheng, Xiaofeng Yang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Lifu Wang, Qinglin Lu, Jie Liu, Liang Dong, Fan Jiang, Ruibin Chen, Lei Wang, Chao Zhang, Jiaxin Lin, Hao Zhang, Zheng Ye, Peng He, Runzhou Wu, Yinhe Wu, Jiayao Du, Jupeng Chen, Xinyue Mao, Dongyuan Guo, Yixuan Tang, Yulin Tsai, Yonghao Tan, Jiaao Yu, Junlin Yu, Keren Zhang, Yifan Li, Peng Chen, Tian Liu, Di Wang, Yuhong Liu, Linus, Jie Jiang, Zhuo Chen, Chunchao Guo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 34</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The creation of high-quality 3D assets, a cornerstone of modern game development, has long been characterized by labor-intensive and specialized workflows. This paper presents Hunyuan3D Studio, an end-to-end AI-powered content creation platform designed to revolutionize the game production pipeline by automating and streamlining the generation of game-ready 3D assets. At its core, Hunyuan3D Studio integrates a suite of advanced neural modules (such as Part-level 3D Generation, Polygon Generation, Semantic UV, etc.) into a cohesive and user-friendly system. This unified framework allows for the rapid transformation of a single concept image or textual description into a fully-realized, production-quality 3D model complete with optimized geometry and high-fidelity PBR textures. We demonstrate that assets generated by Hunyuan3D Studio are not only visually compelling but also adhere to the stringent technical requirements of contemporary game engines, significantly reducing iteration time and lowering the barrier to entry for 3D content creation. By providing a seamless bridge from creative intent to technical asset, Hunyuan3D Studio represents a significant leap forward for AI-assisted workflows in game development and interactive media.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12815 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:33:03 +0000 - AU-Harness: An Open-Source Toolkit for Holistic Evaluation of Audio LLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08031 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08031.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sidharth Surapaneni, Hoang Nguyen, Jash Mehta, Aman Tiwari, Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Akshay Kalkunte, Sai Rajeswar, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are rapidly advancing, but evaluating them remains challenging due to inefficient toolkits that limit fair comparison and systematic assessment. Current frameworks suffer from three critical issues: slow processing that bottlenecks large-scale studies, inconsistent prompting that hurts reproducibility, and narrow task coverage that misses important audio reasoning capabilities. We introduce AU-Harness, an efficient and comprehensive evaluation framework for LALMs. Our system achieves a speedup of up to 127% over existing toolkits through optimized batch processing and parallel execution, enabling large-scale evaluations previously impractical. We provide standardized prompting protocols and flexible configurations for fair model comparison across diverse scenarios. Additionally, we introduce two new evaluation categories: LLM-Adaptive Diarization for temporal audio understanding and Spoken Language Reasoning for complex audio-based cognitive tasks. Through evaluation across 380+ tasks, we reveal significant gaps in current LALMs, particularly in temporal understanding and complex spoken language reasoning tasks. Our findings also highlight a lack of standardization in instruction modality existent across audio benchmarks, which can lead up performance differences up to 9.5 absolute points on the challenging complex instruction following downstream tasks. AU-Harness provides both practical evaluation tools and insights into model limitations, advancing systematic LALM development.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08031 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:30:40 +0000 + PANORAMA: The Rise of Omnidirectional Vision in the Embodied AI Era + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12989 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.12989.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xu Zheng, Chenfei Liao, Ziqiao Weng, Kaiyu Lei, Zihao Dongfang, Haocong He, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lutao Jiang, Lu Qi, Li Chen, Danda Pani Paudel, Kailun Yang, Linfeng Zhang, Luc Van Gool, Xuming Hu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 26</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Omnidirectional vision, using 360-degree vision to understand the environment, has become increasingly critical across domains like robotics, industrial inspection, and environmental monitoring. Compared to traditional pinhole vision, omnidirectional vision provides holistic environmental awareness, significantly enhancing the completeness of scene perception and the reliability of decision-making. However, foundational research in this area has historically lagged behind traditional pinhole vision. This talk presents an emerging trend in the embodied AI era: the rapid development of omnidirectional vision, driven by growing industrial demand and academic interest. We highlight recent breakthroughs in omnidirectional generation, omnidirectional perception, omnidirectional understanding, and related datasets. Drawing on insights from both academia and industry, we propose an ideal panoramic system architecture in the embodied AI era, PANORAMA, which consists of four key subsystems. Moreover, we offer in-depth opinions related to emerging trends and cross-community impacts at the intersection of panoramic vision and embodied AI, along with the future roadmap and open challenges. This overview synthesizes state-of-the-art advancements and outlines challenges and opportunities for future research in building robust, general-purpose omnidirectional AI systems in the embodied AI era.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12989 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:54:37 +0000 - SimpleQA Verified: A Reliable Factuality Benchmark to Measure Parametric Knowledge - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07968 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07968.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lukas Haas, Gal Yona, Giovanni D'Antonio, Sasha Goldshtein, Dipanjan Das</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce SimpleQA Verified, a 1,000-prompt benchmark for evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) short-form factuality based on OpenAI's SimpleQA. It addresses critical limitations in OpenAI's benchmark, including noisy and incorrect labels, topical biases, and question redundancy. SimpleQA Verified was created through a rigorous multi-stage filtering process involving de-duplication, topic balancing, and source reconciliation to produce a more reliable and challenging evaluation set, alongside improvements in the autorater prompt. On this new benchmark, Gemini 2.5 Pro achieves a state-of-the-art F1-score of 55.6, outperforming other frontier models, including GPT-5. This work provides the research community with a higher-fidelity tool to track genuine progress in parametric model factuality and to mitigate hallucinations. The benchmark dataset, evaluation code, and leaderboard are available at: https://www.kaggle.com/benchmarks/deepmind/simpleqa-verified.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07968 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:53:58 +0000 + FinSearchComp: Towards a Realistic, Expert-Level Evaluation of Financial Search and Reasoning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13160 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13160.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Liang Hu, Jianpeng Jiao, Jiashuo Liu, Yanle Ren, Zhoufutu Wen, Kaiyuan Zhang, Xuanliang Zhang, Xiang Gao, Tianci He, Fei Hu, Yali Liao, Zaiyuan Wang, Chenghao Yang, Qianyu Yang, Mingren Yin, Zhiyuan Zeng, Ge Zhang, Xinyi Zhang, Xiying Zhao, Zhenwei Zhu, Hongseok Namkoong, Wenhao Huang, Yuwen Tang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 26</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Search has emerged as core infrastructure for LLM-based agents and is widely viewed as critical on the path toward more general intelligence. Finance is a particularly demanding proving ground: analysts routinely conduct complex, multi-step searches over time-sensitive, domain-specific data, making it ideal for assessing both search proficiency and knowledge-grounded reasoning. Yet no existing open financial datasets evaluate data searching capability of end-to-end agents, largely because constructing realistic, complicated tasks requires deep financial expertise and time-sensitive data is hard to evaluate. We present FinSearchComp, the first fully open-source agent benchmark for realistic, open-domain financial search and reasoning. FinSearchComp comprises three tasks -- Time-Sensitive Data Fetching, Simple Historical Lookup, and Complex Historical Investigation -- closely reproduce real-world financial analyst workflows. To ensure difficulty and reliability, we engage 70 professional financial experts for annotation and implement a rigorous multi-stage quality-assurance pipeline. The benchmark includes 635 questions spanning global and Greater China markets, and we evaluate 21 models (products) on it. Grok 4 (web) tops the global subset, approaching expert-level accuracy. DouBao (web) leads on the Greater China subset. Experimental analyses show that equipping agents with web search and financial plugins substantially improves results on FinSearchComp, and the country origin of models and tools impact performance significantly.By aligning with realistic analyst tasks and providing end-to-end evaluation, FinSearchComp offers a professional, high-difficulty testbed for complex financial search and reasoning.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13160 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 15:13:13 +0000 - Mini-o3: Scaling Up Reasoning Patterns and Interaction Turns for Visual Search - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07969 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07969.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xin Lai, Junyi Li, Wei Li, Tao Liu, Tianjian Li, Hengshuang Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 57</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in large multimodal models have leveraged image-based tools with reinforcement learning to tackle visual problems. However, existing open-source approaches often exhibit monotonous reasoning patterns and allow only a limited number of interaction turns, making them inadequate for difficult tasks that require trial-and-error exploration. In this work, we address this limitation by scaling up tool-based interactions and introduce Mini-o3, a system that executes deep, multi-turn reasoning -- spanning tens of steps -- and achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging visual search tasks. Our recipe for reproducing OpenAI o3-style behaviors comprises three key components. First, we construct the Visual Probe Dataset, a collection of thousands of challenging visual search problems designed for exploratory reasoning. Second, we develop an iterative data collection pipeline to obtain cold-start trajectories that exhibit diverse reasoning patterns, including depth-first search, trial-and-error, and goal maintenance. Third, we propose an over-turn masking strategy that prevents penalization of over-turn responses (those that hit the maximum number of turns) during reinforcement learning, thereby balancing training-time efficiency with test-time scalability. Despite training with an upper bound of only six interaction turns, our model generates trajectories that naturally scale to tens of turns at inference time, with accuracy improving as the number of turns increases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mini-o3 produces rich reasoning patterns and deep thinking paths, effectively solving challenging visual search problems.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07969 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:54:21 +0000 + ROOM: A Physics-Based Continuum Robot Simulator for Photorealistic Medical Datasets Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13177 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13177.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Salvatore Esposito, Matías Mattamala, Daniel Rebain, Francis Xiatian Zhang, Kevin Dhaliwal, Mohsen Khadem, Subramanian Ramamoorthy</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Continuum robots are advancing bronchoscopy procedures by accessing complex lung airways and enabling targeted interventions. However, their development is limited by the lack of realistic training and test environments: Real data is difficult to collect due to ethical constraints and patient safety concerns, and developing autonomy algorithms requires realistic imaging and physical feedback. We present ROOM (Realistic Optical Observation in Medicine), a comprehensive simulation framework designed for generating photorealistic bronchoscopy training data. By leveraging patient CT scans, our pipeline renders multi-modal sensor data including RGB images with realistic noise and light specularities, metric depth maps, surface normals, optical flow and point clouds at medically relevant scales. We validate the data generated by ROOM in two canonical tasks for medical robotics -- multi-view pose estimation and monocular depth estimation, demonstrating diverse challenges that state-of-the-art methods must overcome to transfer to these medical settings. Furthermore, we show that the data produced by ROOM can be used to fine-tune existing depth estimation models to overcome these challenges, also enabling other downstream applications such as navigation. We expect that ROOM will enable large-scale data generation across diverse patient anatomies and procedural scenarios that are challenging to capture in clinical settings. Code and data: https://github.com/iamsalvatore/room.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13177 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 15:30:02 +0000 - Visual Representation Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07979 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07979.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Heeji Yoon, Jaewoo Jung, Junwan Kim, Hyungyu Choi, Heeseong Shin, Sangbeom Lim, Honggyu An, Chaehyun Kim, Jisang Han, Donghyun Kim, Chanho Eom, Sunghwan Hong, Seungryong Kim</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 74</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) trained with visual instruction tuning have achieved strong performance across diverse tasks, yet they remain limited in vision-centric tasks such as object counting or spatial reasoning. We attribute this gap to the prevailing text-only supervision paradigm, which provides only indirect guidance for the visual pathway and often leads MLLMs to discard fine-grained visual details during training. In this paper, we present VIsual Representation ALignment (VIRAL), a simple yet effective regularization strategy that aligns the internal visual representations of MLLMs with those of pre-trained vision foundation models (VFMs). By explicitly enforcing this alignment, VIRAL enables the model not only to retain critical visual details from the input vision encoder but also to complement additional visual knowledge from VFMs, thereby enhancing its ability to reason over complex visual inputs. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across all tasks on widely adopted multimodal benchmarks. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to validate the key design choices underlying our framework. We believe this simple finding opens up an important direction for the effective integration of visual information in training MLLMs.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07979 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:59:14 +0000 + Single-stream Policy Optimization + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13232 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13232.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhongwen Xu, Zihan Ding</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 32</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We revisit policy-gradient optimization for Large Language Models (LLMs) from a single-stream perspective. Prevailing group-based methods like GRPO reduce variance with on-the-fly baselines but suffer from critical flaws: frequent degenerate groups erase learning signals, and synchronization barriers hinder scalability. We introduce Single-stream Policy Optimization (SPO), which eliminates these issues by design. SPO replaces per-group baselines with a persistent, KL-adaptive value tracker and normalizes advantages globally across the batch, providing a stable, low-variance learning signal for every sample. Being group-free, SPO enables higher throughput and scales effectively in long-horizon or tool-integrated settings where generation times vary. Furthermore, the persistent value tracker naturally enables an adaptive curriculum via prioritized sampling. Experiments using Qwen3-8B show that SPO converges more smoothly and attains higher accuracy than GRPO, while eliminating computation wasted on degenerate groups. Ablation studies confirm that SPO's gains stem from its principled approach to baseline estimation and advantage normalization, offering a more robust and efficient path for LLM reasoning. Across five hard math benchmarks with Qwen3 8B, SPO improves the average maj@32 by +3.4 percentage points (pp) over GRPO, driven by substantial absolute point gains on challenging datasets, including +7.3 pp on BRUMO 25, +4.4 pp on AIME 25, +3.3 pp on HMMT 25, and achieves consistent relative gain in pass@k across the evaluated k values. SPO's success challenges the prevailing trend of adding incidental complexity to RL algorithms, highlighting a path where fundamental principles, not architectural workarounds, drive the next wave of progress in LLM reasoning.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13232 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:39:11 +0000 - Parallel-R1: Towards Parallel Thinking via Reinforcement Learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07980 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.07980.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tong Zheng, Hongming Zhang, Wenhao Yu, Xiaoyang Wang, Xinyu Yang, Runpeng Dai, Rui Liu, Huiwen Bao, Chengsong Huang, Heng Huang, Dong Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 90</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains challenging, as existing methods predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over synthetic data, which encourages teacher-forced imitation rather than exploration and generalization. Different from them, we propose Parallel-R1, the first reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables parallel thinking behaviors for complex real-world reasoning tasks. Our framework employs a progressive curriculum that explicitly addresses the cold-start problem in training parallel thinking with RL. We first use SFT on prompt-generated trajectories from easier tasks to instill the parallel thinking ability, then transition to RL to explore and generalize this skill on harder problems. Experiments on various math benchmarks, including MATH, AMC23, and AIME, show that Parallel-R1 successfully instills parallel thinking, leading to 8.4% accuracy improvements over the sequential thinking model trained directly on challenging tasks with RL. Further analysis reveals a clear shift in the model's thinking behavior: at an early stage, it uses parallel thinking as an exploration strategy, while in a later stage, it uses the same capability for multi-perspective verification. Most significantly, we validate parallel thinking as a mid-training exploration scaffold, where this temporary exploratory phase unlocks a higher performance ceiling after RL, yielding a 42.9% improvement over the baseline on AIME25. Our model, data, and code will be open-source at https://github.com/zhengkid/Parallel-R1.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07980 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:59:35 +0000 + The Sum Leaks More Than Its Parts: Compositional Privacy Risks and Mitigations in Multi-Agent Collaboration + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14284 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14284.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Vaidehi Patil, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> As large language models (LLMs) become integral to multi-agent systems, new privacy risks emerge that extend beyond memorization, direct inference, or single-turn evaluations. In particular, seemingly innocuous responses, when composed across interactions, can cumulatively enable adversaries to recover sensitive information, a phenomenon we term compositional privacy leakage. We present the first systematic study of such compositional privacy leaks and possible mitigation methods in multi-agent LLM systems. First, we develop a framework that models how auxiliary knowledge and agent interactions jointly amplify privacy risks, even when each response is benign in isolation. Next, to mitigate this, we propose and evaluate two defense strategies: (1) Theory-of-Mind defense (ToM), where defender agents infer a questioner's intent by anticipating how their outputs may be exploited by adversaries, and (2) Collaborative Consensus Defense (CoDef), where responder agents collaborate with peers who vote based on a shared aggregated state to restrict sensitive information spread. Crucially, we balance our evaluation across compositions that expose sensitive information and compositions that yield benign inferences. Our experiments quantify how these defense strategies differ in balancing the privacy-utility trade-off. We find that while chain-of-thought alone offers limited protection to leakage (~39% sensitive blocking rate), our ToM defense substantially improves sensitive query blocking (up to 97%) but can reduce benign task success. CoDef achieves the best balance, yielding the highest Balanced Outcome (79.8%), highlighting the benefit of combining explicit reasoning with defender collaboration. Together, our results expose a new class of risks in collaborative LLM deployments and provide actionable insights for designing safeguards against compositional, context-driven privacy leakage.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14284 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:57:25 +0000 - EnvX: Agentize Everything with Agentic AI - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08088 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08088.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Linyao Chen, Zimian Peng, Yingxuan Yang, Yikun Wang, Wenzheng Tom Tang, Hiroki H. Kobayashi, Weinan Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The widespread availability of open-source repositories has led to a vast collection of reusable software components, yet their utilization remains manual, error-prone, and disconnected. Developers must navigate documentation, understand APIs, and write integration code, creating significant barriers to efficient software reuse. To address this, we present EnvX, a framework that leverages Agentic AI to agentize GitHub repositories, transforming them into intelligent, autonomous agents capable of natural language interaction and inter-agent collaboration. Unlike existing approaches that treat repositories as static code resources, EnvX reimagines them as active agents through a three-phase process: (1) TODO-guided environment initialization, which sets up the necessary dependencies, data, and validation datasets; (2) human-aligned agentic automation, allowing repository-specific agents to autonomously perform real-world tasks; and (3) Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, enabling multiple agents to collaborate. By combining large language model capabilities with structured tool integration, EnvX automates not just code generation, but the entire process of understanding, initializing, and operationalizing repository functionality. We evaluate EnvX on the GitTaskBench benchmark, using 18 repositories across domains such as image processing, speech recognition, document analysis, and video manipulation. Our results show that EnvX achieves a 74.07% execution completion rate and 51.85% task pass rate, outperforming existing frameworks. Case studies further demonstrate EnvX's ability to enable multi-repository collaboration via the A2A protocol. This work marks a shift from treating repositories as passive code resources to intelligent, interactive agents, fostering greater accessibility and collaboration within the open-source ecosystem.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08088 - Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:51:36 +0000 + EdiVal-Agent: An Object-Centric Framework for Automated, Scalable, Fine-Grained Evaluation of Multi-Turn Editing + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13399 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13399.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tianyu Chen, Yasi Zhang, Zhi Zhang, Peiyu Yu, Shu Wang, Zhendong Wang, Kevin Lin, Xiaofei Wang, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Chung-Ching Lin, Jianwen Xie, Oscar Leong, Lijuan Wang, Ying Nian Wu, Mingyuan Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Instruction-based image editing has advanced rapidly, yet reliable and interpretable evaluation remains a bottleneck. Current protocols either (i) depend on paired reference images -- resulting in limited coverage and inheriting biases from prior generative models -- or (ii) rely solely on zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs), whose prompt-based assessments of instruction following, content consistency, and visual quality are often imprecise. To address this, we introduce EdiVal-Agent, an automated, scalable, and fine-grained evaluation framework for multi-turn instruction-based editing from an object-centric perspective, supported by a suite of expert tools. Given an image, EdiVal-Agent first decomposes it into semantically meaningful objects, then synthesizes diverse, context-aware editing instructions. For evaluation, it integrates VLMs with open-vocabulary object detectors to assess instruction following, uses semantic-level feature extractors to evaluate content consistency, and leverages human preference models to judge visual quality. We show that combining VLMs with object detectors yields stronger agreement with human judgments in instruction-following evaluation compared to using VLMs alone and CLIP-based metrics. Furthermore, the pipeline's modular design allows future tools to be seamlessly integrated, enhancing evaluation accuracy over time. Instantiating this pipeline, we build EdiVal-Bench, a multi-turn editing benchmark covering 9 instruction types and 11 state-of-the-art editing models spanning autoregressive (AR) (including Nano Banana, GPT-Image-1), flow-matching, and diffusion paradigms. We demonstrate that EdiVal-Agent can be used to identify existing failure modes, thereby informing the development of the next generation of editing models. Project page: https://tianyucodings.github.io/EdiVAL-page/.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13399 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:45:39 +0000 - <think> So let's replace this phrase with insult... </think> Lessons learned from generation of toxic texts with LLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08358 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08358.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sergey Pletenev, Daniil Moskovskiy, Alexander Panchenko</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are excellent at generating synthetic data. However, their performance in sensitive domains such as text detoxification has not received proper attention from the scientific community. This paper explores the possibility of using LLM-generated synthetic toxic data as an alternative to human-generated data for training models for detoxification. Using Llama 3 and Qwen activation-patched models, we generated synthetic toxic counterparts for neutral texts from ParaDetox and SST-2 datasets. Our experiments show that models fine-tuned on synthetic data consistently perform worse than those trained on human data, with a drop in performance of up to 30% in joint metrics. The root cause is identified as a critical lexical diversity gap: LLMs generate toxic content using a small, repetitive vocabulary of insults that fails to capture the nuances and variety of human toxicity. These findings highlight the limitations of current LLMs in this domain and emphasize the continued importance of diverse, human-annotated data for building robust detoxification systems.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08358 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025 07:48:24 +0000 + WebSailor-V2: Bridging the Chasm to Proprietary Agents via Synthetic Data and Scalable Reinforcement Learning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13305 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13305.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kuan Li, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin, Rui Ye, Yida Zhao, Liwen Zhang, Litu Ou, Dingchu Zhang, Xixi Wu, Jialong Wu, Xinyu Wang, Zile Qiao, Zhen Zhang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 73</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Transcending human cognitive limitations represents a critical frontier in LLM training. Proprietary agentic systems like DeepResearch have demonstrated superhuman capabilities on extremely complex information-seeking benchmarks such as BrowseComp, a feat previously unattainable. We posit that their success hinges on a sophisticated reasoning pattern absent in open-source models: the ability to systematically reduce extreme uncertainty when navigating vast information landscapes. Based on this insight, we introduce WebSailor, a complete post-training methodology designed to instill this crucial capability. Our approach involves generating novel, high-uncertainty tasks through structured sampling and information obfuscation, RFT cold start, and an efficient agentic RL training algorithm, Duplicating Sampling Policy Optimization (DUPO). With this integrated pipeline, WebSailor significantly outperforms all open-source agents in complex information-seeking tasks, matching proprietary agents' performance and closing the capability gap.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13305 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:57:03 +0000 - HumanAgencyBench: Scalable Evaluation of Human Agency Support in AI Assistants - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08494 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08494.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Benjamin Sturgeon, Daniel Samuelson, Jacob Haimes, Jacy Reese Anthis</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> As humans delegate more tasks and decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), we risk losing control of our individual and collective futures. Relatively simple algorithmic systems already steer human decision-making, such as social media feed algorithms that lead people to unintentionally and absent-mindedly scroll through engagement-optimized content. In this paper, we develop the idea of human agency by integrating philosophical and scientific theories of agency with AI-assisted evaluation methods: using large language models (LLMs) to simulate and validate user queries and to evaluate AI responses. We develop HumanAgencyBench (HAB), a scalable and adaptive benchmark with six dimensions of human agency based on typical AI use cases. HAB measures the tendency of an AI assistant or agent to Ask Clarifying Questions, Avoid Value Manipulation, Correct Misinformation, Defer Important Decisions, Encourage Learning, and Maintain Social Boundaries. We find low-to-moderate agency support in contemporary LLM-based assistants and substantial variation across system developers and dimensions. For example, while Anthropic LLMs most support human agency overall, they are the least supportive LLMs in terms of Avoid Value Manipulation. Agency support does not appear to consistently result from increasing LLM capabilities or instruction-following behavior (e.g., RLHF), and we encourage a shift towards more robust safety and alignment targets.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08494 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025 11:10:10 +0000 + WebResearcher: Unleashing unbounded reasoning capability in Long-Horizon Agents + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13309 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13309.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zile Qiao, Guoxin Chen, Xuanzhong Chen, Donglei Yu, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Zhen Zhang, Baixuan Li, Huifeng Yin, Kuan Li, Rui Min, Minpeng Liao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 62</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in deep-research systems have demonstrated the potential for AI agents to autonomously discover and synthesize knowledge from external sources. In this paper, we introduce WebResearcher, a novel framework for building such agents through two key components: (1) WebResearcher, an iterative deep-research paradigm that reformulates deep research as a Markov Decision Process, where agents periodically consolidate findings into evolving reports while maintaining focused workspaces, overcoming the context suffocation and noise contamination that plague existing mono-contextual approaches; and (2) WebFrontier, a scalable data synthesis engine that generates high-quality training data through tool-augmented complexity escalation, enabling systematic creation of research tasks that bridge the gap between passive knowledge recall and active knowledge construction. Notably, we find that the training data from our paradigm significantly enhances tool-use capabilities even for traditional mono-contextual methods. Furthermore, our paradigm naturally scales through parallel thinking, enabling concurrent multi-agent exploration for more comprehensive conclusions. Extensive experiments across 6 challenging benchmarks demonstrate that WebResearcher achieves state-of-the-art performance, even surpassing frontier proprietary systems.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13309 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:57:17 +0000 - HuMo: Human-Centric Video Generation via Collaborative Multi-Modal Conditioning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08519 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08519.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Liyang Chen, Tianxiang Ma, Jiawei Liu, Bingchuan Li, Zhuowei Chen, Lijie Liu, Xu He, Gen Li, Qian He, Zhiyong Wu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 105</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Human-Centric Video Generation (HCVG) methods seek to synthesize human videos from multimodal inputs, including text, image, and audio. Existing methods struggle to effectively coordinate these heterogeneous modalities due to two challenges: the scarcity of training data with paired triplet conditions and the difficulty of collaborating the sub-tasks of subject preservation and audio-visual sync with multimodal inputs. In this work, we present HuMo, a unified HCVG framework for collaborative multimodal control. For the first challenge, we construct a high-quality dataset with diverse and paired text, reference images, and audio. For the second challenge, we propose a two-stage progressive multimodal training paradigm with task-specific strategies. For the subject preservation task, to maintain the prompt following and visual generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt the minimal-invasive image injection strategy. For the audio-visual sync task, besides the commonly adopted audio cross-attention layer, we propose a focus-by-predicting strategy that implicitly guides the model to associate audio with facial regions. For joint learning of controllabilities across multimodal inputs, building on previously acquired capabilities, we progressively incorporate the audio-visual sync task. During inference, for flexible and fine-grained multimodal control, we design a time-adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance weights across denoising steps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HuMo surpasses specialized state-of-the-art methods in sub-tasks, establishing a unified framework for collaborative multimodal-conditioned HCVG. Project Page: https://phantom-video.github.io/HuMo.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08519 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025 11:54:29 +0000 + Scaling Agents via Continual Pre-training + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13310 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13310.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Guangyu Li, Zhuo Chen, Chenxi Wang, Maojia Song, Xinyu Wang, Kuan Li, Jialong Wu, Xuanzhong Chen, Zile Qiao, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin, Shihao Cai, Runnan Fang, Zhengwei Tao, Wenbiao Yin, Chenxiong Qian, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 93</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) have evolved into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool use and multi-step reasoning for complex problem-solving. However, post-training approaches building upon general-purpose foundation models consistently underperform in agentic tasks, particularly in open-source implementations. We identify the root cause: the absence of robust agentic foundation models forces models during post-training to simultaneously learn diverse agentic behaviors while aligning them to expert demonstrations, thereby creating fundamental optimization tensions. To this end, we are the first to propose incorporating Agentic Continual Pre-training (Agentic CPT) into the deep research agents training pipeline to build powerful agentic foundational models. Based on this approach, we develop a deep research agent model named AgentFounder. We evaluate our AgentFounder-30B on 10 benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance while retains strong tool-use ability, notably 39.9% on BrowseComp-en, 43.3% on BrowseComp-zh, and 31.5% Pass@1 on HLE.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13310 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:57:19 +0000 - Sharing is Caring: Efficient LM Post-Training with Collective RL Experience Sharing - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08721 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08721.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jeffrey Amico, Gabriel Passamani Andrade, John Donaghy, Ben Fielding, Tristin Forbus, Harry Grieve, Semih Kara, Jari Kolehmainen, Yihua Lou, Christopher Nies, Edward Phillip Flores Nuño, Diogo Ortega, Shikhar Rastogi, Austin Virts, Matthew J. Wright</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 470</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Post-training language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) can enhance their complex reasoning capabilities without supervised fine-tuning, as demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1-Zero. However, effectively utilizing RL for LMs requires significant parallelization to scale-up inference, which introduces non-trivial technical challenges (e.g. latency, memory, and reliability) alongside ever-growing financial costs. We present Swarm sAmpling Policy Optimization (SAPO), a fully decentralized and asynchronous RL post-training algorithm. SAPO is designed for decentralized networks of heterogenous compute nodes, where each node manages its own policy model(s) while "sharing" rollouts with others in the network; no explicit assumptions about latency, model homogeneity, or hardware are required and nodes can operate in silo if desired. As a result, the algorithm avoids common bottlenecks in scaling RL post-training while also allowing (and even encouraging) new possibilities. By sampling rollouts "shared" across the network, it enables "Aha moments" to propagate, thereby bootstrapping the learning process. In this paper we show SAPO achieved cumulative reward gains of up to 94% in controlled experiments. We also share insights from tests on a network with thousands of nodes contributed by Gensyn community members running the algorithm on diverse hardware and models during an open-source demo.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08721 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:14:20 +0000 + Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13311 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13311.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 65</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Advanced agentic intelligence is a prerequisite for deploying Large Language Models in practical, real-world applications. Diverse real-world APIs demand precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. The breadth of function-calling competence is closely tied to the diversity of environments in which agents are trained. In this work, we scale up environments as a step towards advancing general agentic intelligence. This gives rise to two central challenges: (i) how to scale environments in a principled manner, and (ii) how to effectively train agentic capabilities from experiences derived through interactions with these environments. To address these, we design a scalable framework that automatically constructs heterogeneous environments that are fully simulated, systematically broadening the space of function-calling scenarios. We further adapt a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy: first endowing agents with fundamental agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. Extensive experiments on agentic benchmarks, tau-bench, tau2-Bench, and ACEBench, demonstrate that our trained model, AgentScaler, significantly enhances the function-calling capability of models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13311 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:57:20 +0000 - AgentGym-RL: Training LLM Agents for Long-Horizon Decision Making through Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08755 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08755.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhiheng Xi, Jixuan Huang, Chenyang Liao, Baodai Huang, Honglin Guo, Jiaqi Liu, Rui Zheng, Junjie Ye, Jiazheng Zhang, Wenxiang Chen, Wei He, Yiwen Ding, Guanyu Li, Zehui Chen, Zhengyin Du, Xuesong Yao, Yufei Xu, Jiecao Chen, Tao Gui, Zuxuan Wu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 40</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Developing autonomous LLM agents capable of making a series of intelligent decisions to solve complex, real-world tasks is a fast-evolving frontier. Like human cognitive development, agents are expected to acquire knowledge and skills through exploration and interaction with the environment. Despite advances, the community still lacks a unified, interactive reinforcement learning (RL) framework that can effectively train such agents from scratch -- without relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) -- across diverse and realistic environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentGym-RL, a new framework to train LLM agents for multi-turn interactive decision-making through RL. The framework features a modular and decoupled architecture, ensuring high flexibility and extensibility. It encompasses a wide variety of real-world scenarios, and supports mainstream RL algorithms. Furthermore, we propose ScalingInter-RL, a training approach designed for exploration-exploitation balance and stable RL optimization. In early stages, it emphasizes exploitation by restricting the number of interactions, and gradually shifts towards exploration with larger horizons to encourage diverse problem-solving strategies. In this way, the agent develops more diverse behaviors and is less prone to collapse under long horizons. We perform extensive experiments to validate the stability and effectiveness of both the AgentGym-RL framework and the ScalingInter-RL approach. Our agents match or surpass commercial models on 27 tasks across diverse environments. We offer key insights and will open-source the complete AgentGym-RL framework -- including code and datasets -- to empower the research community in developing the next generation of intelligent agents.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08755 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:46:11 +0000 + WebWeaver: Structuring Web-Scale Evidence with Dynamic Outlines for Open-Ended Deep Research + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13312 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13312.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zijian Li, Xin Guan, Bo Zhang, Shen Huang, Houquan Zhou, Shaopeng Lai, Ming Yan, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jun Zhang, Jingren Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 94</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper tackles open-ended deep research (OEDR), a complex challenge where AI agents must synthesize vast web-scale information into insightful reports. Current approaches are plagued by dual-fold limitations: static research pipelines that decouple planning from evidence acquisition and one-shot generation paradigms that easily suffer from long-context failure issues like "loss in the middle" and hallucinations. To address these challenges, we introduce WebWeaver, a novel dual-agent framework that emulates the human research process. The planner operates in a dynamic cycle, iteratively interleaving evidence acquisition with outline optimization to produce a comprehensive, source-grounded outline linking to a memory bank of evidence. The writer then executes a hierarchical retrieval and writing process, composing the report section by section. By performing targeted retrieval of only the necessary evidence from the memory bank for each part, it effectively mitigates long-context issues. Our framework establishes a new state-of-the-art across major OEDR benchmarks, including DeepResearch Bench, DeepConsult, and DeepResearchGym. These results validate our human-centric, iterative methodology, demonstrating that adaptive planning and focused synthesis are crucial for producing high-quality, reliable, and well-structured reports.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13312 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:57:21 +0000 - RewardDance: Reward Scaling in Visual Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08826 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08826.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jie Wu, Yu Gao, Zilyu Ye, Ming Li, Liang Li, Hanzhong Guo, Jie Liu, Zeyue Xue, Xiaoxia Hou, Wei Liu, Yan Zeng, Weilin Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 61</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reward Models (RMs) are critical for improving generation models via Reinforcement Learning (RL), yet the RM scaling paradigm in visual generation remains largely unexplored. It primarily due to fundamental limitations in existing approaches: CLIP-based RMs suffer from architectural and input modality constraints, while prevalent Bradley-Terry losses are fundamentally misaligned with the next-token prediction mechanism of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), hindering effective scaling. More critically, the RLHF optimization process is plagued by Reward Hacking issue, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal without improving true quality. To address these challenges, we introduce RewardDance, a scalable reward modeling framework that overcomes these barriers through a novel generative reward paradigm. By reformulating the reward score as the model's probability of predicting a "yes" token, indicating that the generated image outperforms a reference image according to specific criteria, RewardDance intrinsically aligns reward objectives with VLM architectures. This alignment unlocks scaling across two dimensions: (1) Model Scaling: Systematic scaling of RMs up to 26 billion parameters; (2) Context Scaling: Integration of task-specific instructions, reference examples, and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RewardDance significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods in text-to-image, text-to-video, and image-to-video generation. Crucially, we resolve the persistent challenge of "reward hacking": Our large-scale RMs exhibit and maintain high reward variance during RL fine-tuning, proving their resistance to hacking and ability to produce diverse, high-quality outputs. It greatly relieves the mode collapse problem that plagues smaller models.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08826 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025 17:59:31 +0000 + ReSum: Unlocking Long-Horizon Search Intelligence via Context Summarization + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13313 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13313.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xixi Wu, Kuan Li, Yida Zhao, Liwen Zhang, Litu Ou, Huifeng Yin, Zhongwang Zhang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Minhao Cheng, Shuai Wang, Hong Cheng, Jingren Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 61</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Model (LLM)-based web agents demonstrate strong performance on knowledge-intensive tasks but are hindered by context window limitations in paradigms like ReAct. Complex queries involving multiple entities, intertwined relationships, and high uncertainty demand extensive search cycles that rapidly exhaust context budgets before reaching complete solutions. To overcome this challenge, we introduce ReSum, a novel paradigm that enables indefinite exploration through periodic context summarization. ReSum converts growing interaction histories into compact reasoning states, maintaining awareness of prior discoveries while bypassing context constraints. For paradigm adaptation, we propose ReSum-GRPO, integrating GRPO with segmented trajectory training and advantage broadcasting to familiarize agents with summary-conditioned reasoning. Extensive experiments on web agents of varying scales across three benchmarks demonstrate that ReSum delivers an average absolute improvement of 4.5\% over ReAct, with further gains of up to 8.2\% following ReSum-GRPO training. Notably, with only 1K training samples, our WebResummer-30B (a ReSum-GRPO-trained version of WebSailor-30B) achieves 33.3\% Pass@1 on BrowseComp-zh and 18.3\% on BrowseComp-en, surpassing existing open-source web agents.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13313 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:57:22 +0000 - A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08827 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.08827.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kaiyan Zhang, Yuxin Zuo, Bingxiang He, Youbang Sun, Runze Liu, Che Jiang, Yuchen Fan, Kai Tian, Guoli Jia, Pengfei Li, Yu Fu, Xingtai Lv, Yuchen Zhang, Sihang Zeng, Shang Qu, Haozhan Li, Shijie Wang, Yuru Wang, Xinwei Long, Fangfu Liu, Xiang Xu, Jiaze Ma, Xuekai Zhu, Ermo Hua, Yihao Liu, Zonglin Li, Huayu Chen, Xiaoye Qu, Yafu Li, Weize Chen, Zhenzhao Yuan, Junqi Gao, Dong Li, Zhiyuan Ma, Ganqu Cui, Zhiyuan Liu, Biqing Qi, Ning Ding, Bowen Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 135</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In this paper, we survey recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs). RL has achieved remarkable success in advancing the frontier of LLM capabilities, particularly in addressing complex logical tasks such as mathematics and coding. As a result, RL has emerged as a foundational methodology for transforming LLMs into LRMs. With the rapid progress of the field, further scaling of RL for LRMs now faces foundational challenges not only in computational resources but also in algorithm design, training data, and infrastructure. To this end, it is timely to revisit the development of this domain, reassess its trajectory, and explore strategies to enhance the scalability of RL toward Artificial SuperIntelligence (ASI). In particular, we examine research applying RL to LLMs and LRMs for reasoning abilities, especially since the release of DeepSeek-R1, including foundational components, core problems, training resources, and downstream applications, to identify future opportunities and directions for this rapidly evolving area. We hope this review will promote future research on RL for broader reasoning models. Github: https://github.com/TsinghuaC3I/Awesome-RL-for-LRMs</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08827 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025 17:59:43 +0000 + 3D Aware Region Prompted Vision Language Model + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13317 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13317.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> An-Chieh Cheng, Yang Fu, Yukang Chen, Zhijian Liu, Xiaolong Li, Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Song Han, Yao Lu, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov, Hongxu Yin, Xiaolong Wang, Sifei Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Spatial Region 3D (SR-3D) aware vision-language model that connects single-view 2D images and multi-view 3D data through a shared visual token space. SR-3D supports flexible region prompting, allowing users to annotate regions with bounding boxes, segmentation masks on any frame, or directly in 3D, without the need for exhaustive multi-frame labeling. We achieve this by enriching 2D visual features with 3D positional embeddings, which allows the 3D model to draw upon strong 2D priors for more accurate spatial reasoning across frames, even when objects of interest do not co-occur within the same view. Extensive experiments on both general 2D vision language and specialized 3D spatial benchmarks demonstrate that SR-3D achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its effectiveness for unifying 2D and 3D representation space on scene understanding. Moreover, we observe applicability to in-the-wild videos without sensory 3D inputs or ground-truth 3D annotations, where SR-3D accurately infers spatial relationships and metric measurements.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13317 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:59:06 +0000 - Modality Alignment with Multi-scale Bilateral Attention for Multimodal Recommendation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09114 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09114.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kelin Ren, Chan-Yang Ju, Dong-Ho Lee</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multimodal recommendation systems are increasingly becoming foundational technologies for e-commerce and content platforms, enabling personalized services by jointly modeling users' historical behaviors and the multimodal features of items (e.g., visual and textual). However, most existing methods rely on either static fusion strategies or graph-based local interaction modeling, facing two critical limitations: (1) insufficient ability to model fine-grained cross-modal associations, leading to suboptimal fusion quality; and (2) a lack of global distribution-level consistency, causing representational bias. To address these, we propose MambaRec, a novel framework that integrates local feature alignment and global distribution regularization via attention-guided learning. At its core, we introduce the Dilated Refinement Attention Module (DREAM), which uses multi-scale dilated convolutions with channel-wise and spatial attention to align fine-grained semantic patterns between visual and textual modalities. This module captures hierarchical relationships and context-aware associations, improving cross-modal semantic modeling. Additionally, we apply Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and contrastive loss functions to constrain global modality alignment, enhancing semantic consistency. This dual regularization reduces mode-specific deviations and boosts robustness. To improve scalability, MambaRec employs a dimensionality reduction strategy to lower the computational cost of high-dimensional multimodal features. Extensive experiments on real-world e-commerce datasets show that MambaRec outperforms existing methods in fusion quality, generalization, and efficiency. Our code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/rkl71/MambaRec.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09114 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 02:52:26 +0000 + SteeringControl: Holistic Evaluation of Alignment Steering in LLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13450 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13450.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Vincent Siu, Nicholas Crispino, David Park, Nathan W. Henry, Zhun Wang, Yang Liu, Dawn Song, Chenguang Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce SteeringControl, a benchmark for evaluating representation steering methods across core alignment objectives--bias, harmful generation, and hallucination--and their effects on secondary behaviors such as sycophancy and commonsense morality. While prior alignment work often highlights truthfulness or reasoning ability to demonstrate the side effects of representation steering, we find there are many unexplored tradeoffs not yet understood in a systematic way. We collect a dataset of safety-relevant primary and secondary behaviors to evaluate steering effectiveness and behavioral entanglement centered around five popular steering methods. To enable this, we craft a modular steering framework based on unique components that serve as the building blocks of many existing methods. Our results on Qwen-2.5-7B and Llama-3.1-8B find that strong steering performance is dependent on the specific combination of steering method, model, and targeted behavior, and that severe concept entanglement can result from poor combinations of these three as well. We release our code here: https://github.com/wang-research-lab/SteeringControl.git.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13450 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:36:22 +0000 - Gradient-Attention Guided Dual-Masking Synergetic Framework for Robust Text-based Person Retrieval - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09118 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09118.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tianlu Zheng, Yifan Zhang, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Kaicheng Yang, Qichuan Ding</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Although Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) exhibits strong performance across diverse vision tasks, its application to person representation learning faces two critical challenges: (i) the scarcity of large-scale annotated vision-language data focused on person-centric images, and (ii) the inherent limitations of global contrastive learning, which struggles to maintain discriminative local features crucial for fine-grained matching while remaining vulnerable to noisy text tokens. This work advances CLIP for person representation learning through synergistic improvements in data curation and model architecture. First, we develop a noise-resistant data construction pipeline that leverages the in-context learning capabilities of MLLMs to automatically filter and caption web-sourced images. This yields WebPerson, a large-scale dataset of 5M high-quality person-centric image-text pairs. Second, we introduce the GA-DMS (Gradient-Attention Guided Dual-Masking Synergetic) framework, which improves cross-modal alignment by adaptively masking noisy textual tokens based on the gradient-attention similarity score. Additionally, we incorporate masked token prediction objectives that compel the model to predict informative text tokens, enhancing fine-grained semantic representation learning. Extensive experiments show that GA-DMS achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09118 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 03:06:22 +0000 + AERIS: Argonne Earth Systems Model for Reliable and Skillful Predictions + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13523 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13523.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Väinö Hatanpää, Eugene Ku, Jason Stock, Murali Emani, Sam Foreman, Chunyong Jung, Sandeep Madireddy, Tung Nguyen, Varuni Sastry, Ray A. O. Sinurat, Sam Wheeler, Huihuo Zheng, Troy Arcomano, Venkatram Vishwanath, Rao Kotamarthi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Generative machine learning offers new opportunities to better understand complex Earth system dynamics. Recent diffusion-based methods address spectral biases and improve ensemble calibration in weather forecasting compared to deterministic methods, yet have so far proven difficult to scale stably at high resolutions. We introduce AERIS, a 1.3 to 80B parameter pixel-level Swin diffusion transformer to address this gap, and SWiPe, a generalizable technique that composes window parallelism with sequence and pipeline parallelism to shard window-based transformers without added communication cost or increased global batch size. On Aurora (10,080 nodes), AERIS sustains 10.21 ExaFLOPS (mixed precision) and a peak performance of 11.21 ExaFLOPS with 1 times 1 patch size on the 0.25{\deg} ERA5 dataset, achieving 95.5% weak scaling efficiency, and 81.6% strong scaling efficiency. AERIS outperforms the IFS ENS and remains stable on seasonal scales to 90 days, highlighting the potential of billion-parameter diffusion models for weather and climate prediction.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13523 + Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:38:29 +0000 - EchoX: Towards Mitigating Acoustic-Semantic Gap via Echo Training for Speech-to-Speech LLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09174 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09174.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuhao Zhang, Yuhao Du, Zhanchen Dai, Xiangnan Ma, Kaiqi Kou, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 55</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Speech-to-speech large language models (SLLMs) are attracting increasing attention. Derived from text-based large language models (LLMs), SLLMs often exhibit degradation in knowledge and reasoning capabilities. We hypothesize that this limitation arises because current training paradigms for SLLMs fail to bridge the acoustic-semantic gap in the feature representation space. To address this issue, we propose EchoX, which leverages semantic representations and dynamically generates speech training targets. This approach integrates both acoustic and semantic learning, enabling EchoX to preserve strong reasoning abilities as a speech LLM. Experimental results demonstrate that EchoX, with about six thousand hours of training data, achieves advanced performance on multiple knowledge-based question-answering benchmarks. The project is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/EchoX.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09174 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 06:17:59 +0000 + LLM-I: LLMs are Naturally Interleaved Multimodal Creators + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13642 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13642.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zirun Guo, Feng Zhang, Kai Jia, Tao Jin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We propose LLM-Interleaved (LLM-I), a flexible and dynamic framework that reframes interleaved image-text generation as a tool-use problem. LLM-I is designed to overcome the "one-tool" bottleneck of current unified models, which are limited to synthetic imagery and struggle with tasks requiring factual grounding or programmatic precision. Our framework empowers a central LLM or MLLM agent to intelligently orchestrate a diverse toolkit of specialized visual tools, including online image search, diffusion-based generation, code execution, and image editing. The agent is trained to select and apply these tools proficiently via a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework that features a hybrid reward system combining rule-based logic with judgments from LLM and MLLM evaluators. Trained on a diverse new dataset using four different model backbones, LLM-I demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods by a large margin across four benchmarks. We also introduce a novel test-time scaling strategy that provides further performance gains. Project Page: https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/LLM-I.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13642 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 02:33:29 +0000 - Towards Better Dental AI: A Multimodal Benchmark and Instruction Dataset for Panoramic X-ray Analysis - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09254 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09254.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jing Hao, Yuxuan Fan, Yanpeng Sun, Kaixin Guo, Lizhuo Lin, Jinrong Yang, Qi Yong H. Ai, Lun M. Wong, Hao Tang, Kuo Feng Hung</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on general-purpose medical tasks. However, their effectiveness in specialized domains such as dentistry remains underexplored. In particular, panoramic X-rays, a widely used imaging modality in oral radiology, pose interpretative challenges due to dense anatomical structures and subtle pathological cues, which are not captured by existing medical benchmarks or instruction datasets. To this end, we introduce MMOral, the first large-scale multimodal instruction dataset and benchmark tailored for panoramic X-ray interpretation. MMOral consists of 20,563 annotated images paired with 1.3 million instruction-following instances across diverse task types, including attribute extraction, report generation, visual question answering, and image-grounded dialogue. In addition, we present MMOral-Bench, a comprehensive evaluation suite covering five key diagnostic dimensions in dentistry. We evaluate 64 LVLMs on MMOral-Bench and find that even the best-performing model, i.e., GPT-4o, only achieves 41.45% accuracy, revealing significant limitations of current models in this domain. To promote the progress of this specific domain, we also propose OralGPT, which conducts supervised fine-tuning (SFT) upon Qwen2.5-VL-7B with our meticulously curated MMOral instruction dataset. Remarkably, a single epoch of SFT yields substantial performance enhancements for LVLMs, e.g., OralGPT demonstrates a 24.73% improvement. Both MMOral and OralGPT hold significant potential as a critical foundation for intelligent dentistry and enable more clinically impactful multimodal AI systems in the dental field. The dataset, model, benchmark, and evaluation suite are available at https://github.com/isbrycee/OralGPT.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09254 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 08:39:08 +0000 + Improving Context Fidelity via Native Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13683 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13683.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Suyuchen Wang, Jinlin Wang, Xinyu Wang, Shiqi Li, Xiangru Tang, Sirui Hong, Xiao-Wen Chang, Chenglin Wu, Bang Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with context fidelity, producing inconsistent answers when responding to questions based on provided information. Existing approaches either rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate evidence post-answer or train models to perform web searches without necessarily improving utilization of the given context. We propose CARE, a novel native retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that teaches LLMs to explicitly integrate in-context evidence within their reasoning process with the model's own retrieval capabilities. Our method requires limited labeled evidence data while significantly enhancing both retrieval accuracy and answer generation performance through strategically retrieved in-context tokens in the reasoning chain. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world and counterfactual QA benchmarks demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms supervised fine-tuning, traditional retrieval-augmented generation methods, and external retrieval solutions. This work represents a fundamental advancement in making LLMs more accurate, reliable, and efficient for knowledge-intensive tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13683 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 04:28:07 +0000 - Harnessing Uncertainty: Entropy-Modulated Policy Gradients for Long-Horizon LLM Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09265 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09265.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiawei Wang, Jiacai Liu, Yuqian Fu, Yingru Li, Xintao Wang, Yuan Lin, Yu Yue, Lin Zhang, Yang Wang, Ke Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 36</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In long-horizon tasks, recent agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) face a significant challenge that sparse, outcome-based rewards make it difficult to assign credit to intermediate steps. Previous methods mainly focus on creating dense reward signals to guide learning, either through traditional reinforcement learning techniques like inverse reinforcement learning or by using Process Reward Models for step-by-step feedback. In this paper, we identify a fundamental problem in the learning dynamics of LLMs: the magnitude of policy gradients is inherently coupled with the entropy, which leads to inefficient small updates for confident correct actions and potentially destabilizes large updates for uncertain ones. To resolve this, we propose Entropy-Modulated Policy Gradients (EMPG), a framework that re-calibrates the learning signal based on step-wise uncertainty and the final task outcome. EMPG amplifies updates for confident correct actions, penalizes confident errors, and attenuates updates from uncertain steps to stabilize exploration. We further introduce a bonus term for future clarity that encourages agents to find more predictable solution paths. Through comprehensive experiments on three challenging agent tasks, WebShop, ALFWorld, and Deep Search, we demonstrate that EMPG achieves substantial performance gains and significantly outperforms strong policy gradient baselines. Project page is at https://empgseed-seed.github.io/</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09265 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 08:50:01 +0000 + Scrub It Out! Erasing Sensitive Memorization in Code Language Models via Machine Unlearning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13755 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13755.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhaoyang Chu, Yao Wan, Zhikun Zhang, Di Wang, Zhou Yang, Hongyu Zhang, Pan Zhou, Xuanhua Shi, Hai Jin, David Lo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> While Code Language Models (CLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in software engineering tasks such as code generation and summarization, recent empirical studies reveal a critical privacy vulnerability: these models exhibit unintended memorization of sensitive training data, enabling verbatim reproduction of confidential information when specifically prompted. To address this issue, several approaches, including training data de-duplication and differential privacy augmentation, have been proposed. However, these methods require full-model retraining for deployed CLMs, which incurs substantial computational costs. In this paper, we aim to answer the following research question: Can sensitive information memorized by CLMs be erased effectively and efficiently? We conduct a pioneering investigation into erasing sensitive memorization in CLMs through machine unlearning - a post-hoc modification method that removes specific information from trained models without requiring full retraining. Specifically, we first quantify the memorization risks of sensitive data within CLM training datasets and curate a high-risk dataset of 50,000 sensitive memorized samples as unlearning targets. We study two widely used gradient ascent-based unlearning approaches: the vanilla and constraint-based methods, and introduce CodeEraser, an advanced variant that selectively unlearns sensitive memorized segments in code while preserving the structural integrity and functional correctness of the surrounding code. Extensive experiments on three families of CLMs, i.e., CodeParrot, CodeGen-Mono, and Qwen2.5-Coder, validate the effectiveness and efficiency of CodeEraser in erasing targeted sensitive memorization while maintaining model utility.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13755 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:12:35 +0000 - Visual Programmability: A Guide for Code-as-Thought in Chart Understanding - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09286 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09286.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Bohao Tang, Yan Ma, Fei Zhang, Jiadi Su, Ethan Chern, Zhulin Hu, Zhixin Wang, Pengfei Liu, Ya Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Chart understanding presents a critical test to the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Prior approaches face critical limitations: some rely on external tools, making them brittle and constrained by a predefined toolkit, while others fine-tune specialist models that often adopt a single reasoning strategy, such as text-based chain-of-thought (CoT). The intermediate steps of text-based reasoning are difficult to verify, which complicates the use of reinforcement-learning signals that reward factual accuracy. To address this, we propose a Code-as-Thought (CaT) approach to represent the visual information of a chart in a verifiable, symbolic format. Our key insight is that this strategy must be adaptive: a fixed, code-only implementation consistently fails on complex charts where symbolic representation is unsuitable. This finding leads us to introduce Visual Programmability: a learnable property that determines if a chart-question pair is better solved with code or direct visual analysis. We implement this concept in an adaptive framework where a VLM learns to choose between the CaT pathway and a direct visual reasoning pathway. The selection policy of the model is trained with reinforcement learning using a novel dual-reward system. This system combines a data-accuracy reward to ground the model in facts and prevent numerical hallucination, with a decision reward that teaches the model when to use each strategy, preventing it from defaulting to a single reasoning mode. Experiments demonstrate strong and robust performance across diverse chart-understanding benchmarks. Our work shows that VLMs can be taught not only to reason but also how to reason, dynamically selecting the optimal reasoning pathway for each task.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09286 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 09:22:16 +0000 + THOR: Tool-Integrated Hierarchical Optimization via RL for Mathematical Reasoning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13761 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.13761.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Qikai Chang, Zhenrong Zhang, Pengfei Hu, Jiefeng Ma, Yicheng Pan, Jianshu Zhang, Jun Du, Quan Liu, Jianqing Gao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning, but still continue to struggle with high-precision tasks like numerical computation and formal symbolic manipulation. Integrating external tools has emerged as a promising approach to bridge this gap. Despite recent advances, existing methods struggle with three key challenges: constructing tool-integrated reasoning data, performing fine-grained optimization, and enhancing inference. To overcome these limitations, we propose THOR (Tool-Integrated Hierarchical Optimization via RL). First, we introduce TIRGen, a multi-agent actor-critic-based pipeline for constructing high-quality datasets of tool-integrated reasoning paths, aligning with the policy and generalizing well across diverse models. Second, to perform fine-grained hierarchical optimization, we introduce an RL strategy that jointly optimizes for both trajectory-level problem solving and step-level code generation. This is motivated by our key insight that the success of an intermediate tool call is a strong predictor of the final answer's correctness. Finally, THOR incorporates a self-correction mechanism that leverages immediate tool feedback to dynamically revise erroneous reasoning paths during inference. Our approach demonstrates strong generalization across diverse models, performing effectively in both reasoning and non-reasoning models. It further achieves state-of-the-art performance for models of a similar scale on multiple mathematical benchmarks, while also delivering consistent improvements on code benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/JingMog/THOR.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13761 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:16:12 +0000 - Cross-Domain Evaluation of Transformer-Based Vulnerability Detection on Open & Industry Data - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09313 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09313.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Moritz Mock, Thomas Forrer, Barbara Russo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Deep learning solutions for vulnerability detection proposed in academic research are not always accessible to developers, and their applicability in industrial settings is rarely addressed. Transferring such technologies from academia to industry presents challenges related to trustworthiness, legacy systems, limited digital literacy, and the gap between academic and industrial expertise. For deep learning in particular, performance and integration into existing workflows are additional concerns. In this work, we first evaluate the performance of CodeBERT for detecting vulnerable functions in industrial and open-source software. We analyse its cross-domain generalisation when fine-tuned on open-source data and tested on industrial data, and vice versa, also exploring strategies for handling class imbalance. Based on these results, we develop AI-DO(Automating vulnerability detection Integration for Developers' Operations), a Continuous Integration-Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)-integrated recommender system that uses fine-tuned CodeBERT to detect and localise vulnerabilities during code review without disrupting workflows. Finally, we assess the tool's perceived usefulness through a survey with the company's IT professionals. Our results show that models trained on industrial data detect vulnerabilities accurately within the same domain but lose performance on open-source code, while a deep learner fine-tuned on open data, with appropriate undersampling techniques, improves the detection of vulnerabilities.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09313 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 09:58:43 +0000 + Hala Technical Report: Building Arabic-Centric Instruction & Translation Models at Scale + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14008 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14008.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, Mohammad Zbeeb, Bernard Ghanem</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 81</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Hala, a family of Arabic-centric instruction and translation models built with our translate-and-tune pipeline. We first compress a strong ARleftrightarrowEN teacher to FP8 (yielding sim2times higher throughput with no quality loss) and use it to create high-fidelity bilingual supervision. A lightweight language model LFM2-1.2B is then fine-tuned on this data and used to translate high-quality English instruction sets into Arabic, producing a million-scale corpus tailored to instruction following. We train Hala models at 350M, 700M, 1.2B, and 9B parameters, and apply slerp merging to balance Arabic specialization with base-model strengths. On Arabic-centric benchmarks, Hala achieves state-of-the-art results within both the "nano" (leq2B) and "small" (7-9B) categories, outperforming their bases. We release models, data, evaluation, and recipes to accelerate research in Arabic NLP.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14008 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:19:28 +0000 - OmniEVA: Embodied Versatile Planner via Task-Adaptive 3D-Grounded and Embodiment-aware Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09332 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09332.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuecheng Liu, Dafeng Chi, Shiguang Wu, Zhanguang Zhang, Yuzheng Zhuang, Bowen Yang, He Zhu, Lingfeng Zhang, Pengwei Xie, David Gamaliel Arcos Bravo, Yingxue Zhang, Jianye Hao, Xingyue Quan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have opened new opportunities for embodied intelligence, enabling multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction, as well as continuous spatial decision-making. Nevertheless, current MLLM-based embodied systems face two critical limitations. First, Geometric Adaptability Gap: models trained solely on 2D inputs or with hard-coded 3D geometry injection suffer from either insufficient spatial information or restricted 2D generalization, leading to poor adaptability across tasks with diverse spatial demands. Second, Embodiment Constraint Gap: prior work often neglects the physical constraints and capacities of real robots, resulting in task plans that are theoretically valid but practically infeasible.To address these gaps, we introduce OmniEVA -- an embodied versatile planner that enables advanced embodied reasoning and task planning through two pivotal innovations: (1) a Task-Adaptive 3D Grounding mechanism, which introduces a gated router to perform explicit selective regulation of 3D fusion based on contextual requirements, enabling context-aware 3D grounding for diverse embodied tasks. (2) an Embodiment-Aware Reasoning framework that jointly incorporates task goals and embodiment constraints into the reasoning loop, resulting in planning decisions that are both goal-directed and executable. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that OmniEVA not only achieves state-of-the-art general embodied reasoning performance, but also exhibits a strong ability across a wide range of downstream scenarios. Evaluations of a suite of proposed embodied benchmarks, including both primitive and composite tasks, confirm its robust and versatile planning capabilities. Project page: https://omnieva.github.io</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09332 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 10:32:22 +0000 + Quantum Variational Activation Functions Empower Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14026 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14026.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiun-Cheng Jiang, Morris Yu-Chao Huang, Tianlong Chen, Hsi-Sheng Goan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are central to quantum machine learning, while recent progress in Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) highlights the power of learnable activation functions. We unify these directions by introducing quantum variational activation functions (QVAFs), realized through single-qubit data re-uploading circuits called DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioNs (DARUANs). We show that DARUAN with trainable weights in data pre-processing possesses an exponentially growing frequency spectrum with data repetitions, enabling an exponential reduction in parameter size compared with Fourier-based activations without loss of expressivity. Embedding DARUAN into KANs yields quantum-inspired KANs (QKANs), which retain the interpretability of KANs while improving their parameter efficiency, expressivity, and generalization. We further introduce two novel techniques to enhance scalability, feasibility and computational efficiency, such as layer extension and hybrid QKANs (HQKANs) as drop-in replacements of multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) for feed-forward networks in large-scale models. We provide theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on function regression, image classification, and autoregressive generative language modeling, demonstrating the efficiency and scalability of QKANs. DARUANs and QKANs offer a promising direction for advancing quantum machine learning on both noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware and classical quantum simulators.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14026 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:28:42 +0000 - VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Model - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09372 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09372.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yihao Wang, Pengxiang Ding, Lingxiao Li, Can Cui, Zirui Ge, Xinyang Tong, Wenxuan Song, Han Zhao, Wei Zhao, Pengxu Hou, Siteng Huang, Yifan Tang, Wenhui Wang, Ru Zhang, Jianyi Liu, Donglin Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 169</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically bridge the gap between perceptual and action spaces by pre-training a large-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) on robotic data. While this approach greatly enhances performance, it also incurs significant training costs. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively bridge vision-language (VL) representations to action (A). We introduce VLA-Adapter, a novel paradigm designed to reduce the reliance of VLA models on large-scale VLMs and extensive pre-training. To this end, we first systematically analyze the effectiveness of various VL conditions and present key findings on which conditions are essential for bridging perception and action spaces. Based on these insights, we propose a lightweight Policy module with Bridge Attention, which autonomously injects the optimal condition into the action space. In this way, our method achieves high performance using only a 0.5B-parameter backbone, without any robotic data pre-training. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic benchmarks demonstrate that VLA-Adapter not only achieves state-of-the-art level performance, but also offers the fast inference speed reported to date. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed advanced bridging paradigm, VLA-Adapter enables the training of a powerful VLA model in just 8 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU, greatly lowering the barrier to deploying the VLA model. Project page: https://vla-adapter.github.io/.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09372 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:42:21 +0000 + SAIL-VL2 Technical Report + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14033 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14033.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weijie Yin, Yongjie Ye, Fangxun Shu, Yue Liao, Zijian Kang, Hongyuan Dong, Haiyang Yu, Dingkang Yang, Jiacong Wang, Han Wang, Wenzhuo Liu, Xiao Liang, Shuicheng Yan, Chao Feng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 37</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce SAIL-VL2, an open-suite vision-language foundation model (LVM) for comprehensive multimodal understanding and reasoning. As the successor to SAIL-VL, SAIL-VL2 achieves state-of-the-art performance at the 2B and 8B parameter scales across diverse image and video benchmarks, demonstrating strong capabilities from fine-grained perception to complex reasoning. Three core innovations drive its effectiveness. First, a large-scale data curation pipeline with scoring and filtering strategies enhances both quality and distribution across captioning, OCR, QA, and video data, improving training efficiency. Second, a progressive training framework begins with a powerful pre-trained vision encoder (SAIL-ViT), advances through multimodal pre-training, and culminates in a thinking-fusion SFT-RL hybrid paradigm that systematically strengthens model capabilities. Third, architectural advances extend beyond dense LLMs to efficient sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) designs. With these contributions, SAIL-VL2 demonstrates competitive performance across 106 datasets and achieves state-of-the-art results on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as MMMU and MathVista. Furthermore, on the OpenCompass leaderboard, SAIL-VL2-2B ranks first among officially released open-source models under the 4B parameter scale, while serving as an efficient and extensible foundation for the open-source multimodal community.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14033 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:34:02 +0000 - ObjectReact: Learning Object-Relative Control for Visual Navigation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09594 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09594.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sourav Garg, Dustin Craggs, Vineeth Bhat, Lachlan Mares, Stefan Podgorski, Madhava Krishna, Feras Dayoub, Ian Reid</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Visual navigation using only a single camera and a topological map has recently become an appealing alternative to methods that require additional sensors and 3D maps. This is typically achieved through an "image-relative" approach to estimating control from a given pair of current observation and subgoal image. However, image-level representations of the world have limitations because images are strictly tied to the agent's pose and embodiment. In contrast, objects, being a property of the map, offer an embodiment- and trajectory-invariant world representation. In this work, we present a new paradigm of learning "object-relative" control that exhibits several desirable characteristics: a) new routes can be traversed without strictly requiring to imitate prior experience, b) the control prediction problem can be decoupled from solving the image matching problem, and c) high invariance can be achieved in cross-embodiment deployment for variations across both training-testing and mapping-execution settings. We propose a topometric map representation in the form of a "relative" 3D scene graph, which is used to obtain more informative object-level global path planning costs. We train a local controller, dubbed "ObjectReact", conditioned directly on a high-level "WayObject Costmap" representation that eliminates the need for an explicit RGB input. We demonstrate the advantages of learning object-relative control over its image-relative counterpart across sensor height variations and multiple navigation tasks that challenge the underlying spatial understanding capability, e.g., navigating a map trajectory in the reverse direction. We further show that our sim-only policy is able to generalize well to real-world indoor environments. Code and supplementary material are accessible via project page: https://object-react.github.io/</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09594 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:34:17 +0000 + Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replication + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14055 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14055.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Gang Cheng, Xin Gao, Li Hu, Siqi Hu, Mingyang Huang, Chaonan Ji, Ju Li, Dechao Meng, Jinwei Qi, Penchong Qiao, Zhen Shen, Yafei Song, Ke Sun, Linrui Tian, Feng Wang, Guangyuan Wang, Qi Wang, Zhongjian Wang, Jiayu Xiao, Sheng Xu, Bang Zhang, Peng Zhang, Xindi Zhang, Zhe Zhang, Jingren Zhou, Lian Zhuo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce Wan-Animate, a unified framework for character animation and replacement. Given a character image and a reference video, Wan-Animate can animate the character by precisely replicating the expressions and movements of the character in the video to generate high-fidelity character videos. Alternatively, it can integrate the animated character into the reference video to replace the original character, replicating the scene's lighting and color tone to achieve seamless environmental integration. Wan-Animate is built upon the Wan model. To adapt it for character animation tasks, we employ a modified input paradigm to differentiate between reference conditions and regions for generation. This design unifies multiple tasks into a common symbolic representation. We use spatially-aligned skeleton signals to replicate body motion and implicit facial features extracted from source images to reenact expressions, enabling the generation of character videos with high controllability and expressiveness. Furthermore, to enhance environmental integration during character replacement, we develop an auxiliary Relighting LoRA. This module preserves the character's appearance consistency while applying the appropriate environmental lighting and color tone. Experimental results demonstrate that Wan-Animate achieves state-of-the-art performance. We are committed to open-sourcing the model weights and its source code.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14055 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:00:57 +0000 - Kling-Avatar: Grounding Multimodal Instructions for Cascaded Long-Duration Avatar Animation Synthesis - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09595 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09595.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yikang Ding, Jiwen Liu, Wenyuan Zhang, Zekun Wang, Wentao Hu, Liyuan Cui, Mingming Lao, Yingchao Shao, Hui Liu, Xiaohan Li, Ming Chen, Xiaoqiang Liu, Yu-Shen Liu, Pengfei Wan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 42</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in audio-driven avatar video generation have significantly enhanced audio-visual realism. However, existing methods treat instruction conditioning merely as low-level tracking driven by acoustic or visual cues, without modeling the communicative purpose conveyed by the instructions. This limitation compromises their narrative coherence and character expressiveness. To bridge this gap, we introduce Kling-Avatar, a novel cascaded framework that unifies multimodal instruction understanding with photorealistic portrait generation. Our approach adopts a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we design a multimodal large language model (MLLM) director that produces a blueprint video conditioned on diverse instruction signals, thereby governing high-level semantics such as character motion and emotions. In the second stage, guided by blueprint keyframes, we generate multiple sub-clips in parallel using a first-last frame strategy. This global-to-local framework preserves fine-grained details while faithfully encoding the high-level intent behind multimodal instructions. Our parallel architecture also enables fast and stable generation of long-duration videos, making it suitable for real-world applications such as digital human livestreaming and vlogging. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we construct a benchmark of 375 curated samples covering diverse instructions and challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Kling-Avatar is capable of generating vivid, fluent, long-duration videos at up to 1080p and 48 fps, achieving superior performance in lip synchronization accuracy, emotion and dynamic expressiveness, instruction controllability, identity preservation, and cross-domain generalization. These results establish Kling-Avatar as a new benchmark for semantically grounded, high-fidelity audio-driven avatar synthesis.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09595 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:34:57 +0000 + MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlook + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14142 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14142.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Peng Xu, Shengwu Xiong, Jiajun Zhang, Yaxiong Chen, Bowen Zhou, Chen Change Loy, David A. Clifton, Kyoung Mu Lee, Luc Van Gool, Ruiming He, Ruilin Yao, Xinwei Long, Jirui Huang, Kai Tian, Sa Yang, Yihua Shao, Jin Feng, Yue Zhong, Jiakai Zhou, Cheng Tang, Tianyu Zou, Yifang Zhang, Junming Liang, Guoyou Li, Zhaoxiang Wang, Qiang Zhou, Yichen Zhao, Shili Xiong, Hyeongjin Nam, Jaerin Lee, Jaeyoung Chung, JoonKyu Park, Junghun Oh, Kanggeon Lee, Wooseok Lee, Juneyoung Ro, Turghun Osman, Can Hu, Chaoyang Liao, Cheng Chen, Chengcheng Han, Chenhao Qiu, Chong Peng, Cong Xu, Dailin Li, Feiyu Wang, Feng Gao, Guibo Zhu, Guopeng Tang, Haibo Lu, Han Fang, Han Qi, Hanxiao Wu, Haobo Cheng, Hongbo Sun, Hongyao Chen, Huayong Hu, Hui Li, Jiaheng Ma, Jiang Yu, Jianing Wang, Jie Yang, Jing He, Jinglin Zhou, Jingxuan Li, Josef Kittler, Lihao Zheng, Linnan Zhao, Mengxi Jia, Muyang Yan, Nguyen Thanh Thien, Pu Luo, Qi Li, Shien Song, Shijie Dong, Shuai Shao, Shutao Li, Taofeng Xue, Tianyang Xu, Tianyi Gao, Tingting Li, Wei Zhang, Weiyang Su, Xiaodong Dong, Xiao-Jun Wu, Xiaopeng Zhou, Xin Chen, Xin Wei, Xinyi You, Xudong Kang, Xujie Zhou, Xusheng Liu, Yanan Wang, Yanbin Huang, Yang Liu, Yang Yang, Yanglin Deng, Yashu Kang, Ye Yuan, Yi Wen, Yicen Tian, Yilin Tao, Yin Tang, Yipeng Lin, Yiqing Wang, Yiting Xi, Yongkang Yu, Yumei Li, Yuxin Qin, Yuying Chen, Yuzhe Cen, Zhaofan Zou, Zhaohong Liu, Zhehao Shen, Zhenglin Du, Zhengyang Li, Zhenni Huang, Zhenwei Shao, Zhilong Song, Zhiyong Feng, Zhiyu Wang, Zhou Yu, Ziang Li, Zihan Zhai, Zijian Zhang, Ziyang Peng, Ziyun Xiao, Zongshu Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applications of MLLMs. Our organizing team released two tailored datasets Lens and AdsQA as test sets, which support general reasoning in 12 daily scenarios and domain-specific reasoning in advertisement videos, respectively. We evaluated 40+ baselines that include both generalist MLLMs and task-specific models, and opened up three competition tracks, i.e., Visual Grounding in Real-world Scenarios (VG-RS), Visual Question Answering with Spatial Awareness (VQA-SA), and Visual Reasoning in Creative Advertisement Videos (VR-Ads). Finally, 76 teams from the renowned academic and industrial institutions have registered and 40+ valid submissions (out of 1200+) have been included in our ranking lists. Our datasets, code sets (40+ baselines and 15+ participants' methods), and rankings are publicly available on the MARS2 workshop website and our GitHub organization page https://github.com/mars2workshop/, where our updates and announcements of upcoming events will be continuously provided.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14142 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:21:34 +0000 - LoCoBench: A Benchmark for Long-Context Large Language Models in Complex Software Engineering - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09614 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09614.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jielin Qiu, Zuxin Liu, Zhiwei Liu, Rithesh Murthy, Jianguo Zhang, Haolin Chen, Shiyu Wang, Ming Zhu, Liangwei Yang, Juntao Tan, Zhepeng Cen, Cheng Qian, Shelby Heinecke, Weiran Yao, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The emergence of long-context language models with context windows extending to millions of tokens has created new opportunities for sophisticated code understanding and software development evaluation. We propose LoCoBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate long-context LLMs in realistic, complex software development scenarios. Unlike existing code evaluation benchmarks that focus on single-function completion or short-context tasks, LoCoBench addresses the critical evaluation gap for long-context capabilities that require understanding entire codebases, reasoning across multiple files, and maintaining architectural consistency across large-scale software systems. Our benchmark provides 8,000 evaluation scenarios systematically generated across 10 programming languages, with context lengths spanning 10K to 1M tokens, a 100x variation that enables precise assessment of long-context performance degradation in realistic software development settings. LoCoBench introduces 8 task categories that capture essential long-context capabilities: architectural understanding, cross-file refactoring, multi-session development, bug investigation, feature implementation, code comprehension, integration testing, and security analysis. Through a 5-phase pipeline, we create diverse, high-quality scenarios that challenge LLMs to reason about complex codebases at unprecedented scale. We introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework with 17 metrics across 4 dimensions, including 8 new evaluation metrics, combined in a LoCoBench Score (LCBS). Our evaluation of state-of-the-art long-context models reveals substantial performance gaps, demonstrating that long-context understanding in complex software development represents a significant unsolved challenge that demands more attention. LoCoBench is released at: https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/LoCoBench.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09614 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:55:04 +0000 + Synthesizing Behaviorally-Grounded Reasoning Chains: A Data-Generation Framework for Personal Finance LLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14180 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14180.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Akhil Theerthala</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Personalized financial advice requires consideration of user goals, constraints, risk tolerance, and jurisdiction. Prior LLM work has focused on support systems for investors and financial planners. Simultaneously, numerous recent studies examine broader personal finance tasks, including budgeting, debt management, retirement, and estate planning, through agentic pipelines that incur high maintenance costs, yielding less than 25% of their expected financial returns. In this study, we introduce a novel and reproducible framework that integrates relevant financial context with behavioral finance studies to construct supervision data for end-to-end advisors. Using this framework, we create a 19k sample reasoning dataset and conduct a comprehensive fine-tuning of the Qwen-3-8B model on the dataset. Through a held-out test split and a blind LLM-jury study, we demonstrate that through careful data curation and behavioral integration, our 8B model achieves performance comparable to significantly larger baselines (14-32B parameters) across factual accuracy, fluency, and personalization metrics while incurring 80% lower costs than the larger counterparts.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14180 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 17:12:38 +0000 - Can Understanding and Generation Truly Benefit Together -- or Just Coexist? - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09666 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09666.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhiyuan Yan, Kaiqing Lin, Zongjian Li, Junyan Ye, Hui Han, Zhendong Wang, Hao Liu, Bin Lin, Hao Li, Xue Xu, Xinyan Xiao, Jingdong Wang, Haifeng Wang, Li Yuan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 30</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In this paper, we introduce an insightful paradigm through the Auto-Encoder lens-understanding as the encoder (I2T) that compresses images into text, and generation as the decoder (T2I) that reconstructs images from that text. Using reconstruction fidelity as the unified training objective, we enforce the coherent bidirectional information flow between the understanding and generation processes, bringing mutual gains. To implement this, we propose UAE, a novel framework for unified multimodal learning. We begin by pre-training the decoder with large-scale long-context image captions to capture fine-grained semantic and complex spatial relationships. We then propose Unified-GRPO via reinforcement learning (RL), which covers three stages: (1) A cold-start phase to gently initialize both encoder and decoder with a semantic reconstruction loss; (2) Generation for Understanding, where the encoder is trained to generate informative captions that maximize the decoder's reconstruction quality, enhancing its visual understanding; (3) Understanding for Generation, where the decoder is refined to reconstruct from these captions, forcing it to leverage every detail and improving its long-context instruction following and generation fidelity. For evaluation, we introduce Unified-Bench, the first benchmark tailored to assess the degree of unification of the UMMs. A surprising "aha moment" arises within the multimodal learning domain: as RL progresses, the encoder autonomously produces more descriptive captions, while the decoder simultaneously demonstrates a profound ability to understand these intricate descriptions, resulting in reconstructions of striking fidelity.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09666 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:57:59 +0000 + GenExam: A Multidisciplinary Text-to-Image Exam + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14232 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14232.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhaokai Wang, Penghao Yin, Xiangyu Zhao, Changyao Tian, Yu Qiao, Wenhai Wang, Jifeng Dai, Gen Luo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 20</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Exams are a fundamental test of expert-level intelligence and require integrated understanding, reasoning, and generation. Existing exam-style benchmarks mainly focus on understanding and reasoning tasks, and current generation benchmarks emphasize the illustration of world knowledge and visual concepts, neglecting the evaluation of rigorous drawing exams. We introduce GenExam, the first benchmark for multidisciplinary text-to-image exams, featuring 1,000 samples across 10 subjects with exam-style prompts organized under a four-level taxonomy. Each problem is equipped with ground-truth images and fine-grained scoring points to enable a precise evaluation of semantic correctness and visual plausibility. Experiments show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-Image-1 and Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image achieve less than 15% strict scores, and most models yield almost 0%, suggesting the great challenge of our benchmark. By framing image generation as an exam, GenExam offers a rigorous assessment of models' ability to integrate knowledge, reasoning, and generation, providing insights on the path to general AGI.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14232 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 17:59:14 +0000 - CDE: Curiosity-Driven Exploration for Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09675 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09675.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Runpeng Dai, Linfeng Song, Haolin Liu, Zhenwen Liang, Dian Yu, Haitao Mi, Zhaopeng Tu, Rui Liu, Tong Zheng, Hongtu Zhu, Dong Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet current RLVR methods often explore poorly, leading to premature convergence and entropy collapse. To address this challenge, we introduce Curiosity-Driven Exploration (CDE), a framework that leverages the model's own intrinsic sense of curiosity to guide exploration. We formalize curiosity with signals from both the actor and the critic: for the actor, we use perplexity over its generated response, and for the critic, we use the variance of value estimates from a multi-head architecture. Both signals serve as an exploration bonus within the RLVR framework to guide the model. Our theoretical analysis shows that the actor-wise bonus inherently penalizes overconfident errors and promotes diversity among correct responses; moreover, we connect the critic-wise bonus to the well-established count-based exploration bonus in RL. Empirically, our method achieves an approximate +3 point improvement over standard RLVR using GRPO/PPO on AIME benchmarks. Further analysis identifies a calibration collapse mechanism within RLVR, shedding light on common LLM failure modes.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09675 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:59:17 +0000 + Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs for Global Language Environments + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14233.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Alejandro Hernández-Cano, Alexander Hägele, Allen Hao Huang, Angelika Romanou, Antoni-Joan Solergibert, Barna Pasztor, Bettina Messmer, Dhia Garbaya, Eduard Frank Ďurech, Ido Hakimi, Juan García Giraldo, Mete Ismayilzada, Negar Foroutan, Skander Moalla, Tiancheng Chen, Vinko Sabolčec, Yixuan Xu, Michael Aerni, Badr AlKhamissi, Ines Altemir Marinas, Mohammad Hossein Amani, Matin Ansaripour, Ilia Badanin, Harold Benoit, Emanuela Boros, Nicholas Browning, Fabian Bösch, Maximilian Böther, Niklas Canova, Camille Challier, Clement Charmillot, Jonathan Coles, Jan Deriu, Arnout Devos, Lukas Drescher, Daniil Dzenhaliou, Maud Ehrmann, Dongyang Fan, Simin Fan, Silin Gao, Miguel Gila, María Grandury, Diba Hashemi, Alexander Hoyle, Jiaming Jiang, Mark Klein, Andrei Kucharavy, Anastasiia Kucherenko, Frederike Lübeck, Roman Machacek, Theofilos Manitaras, Andreas Marfurt, Kyle Matoba, Simon Matrenok, Henrique Mendoncça, Fawzi Roberto Mohamed, Syrielle Montariol, Luca Mouchel, Sven Najem-Meyer, Jingwei Ni, Gennaro Oliva, Matteo Pagliardini, Elia Palme, Andrei Panferov, Léo Paoletti, Marco Passerini, Ivan Pavlov, Auguste Poiroux, Kaustubh Ponkshe, Nathan Ranchin, Javi Rando, Mathieu Sauser, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Muhammad Ali Sayfiddinov, Marian Schneider, Stefano Schuppli, Marco Scialanga, Andrei Semenov, Kumar Shridhar, Raghav Singhal, Anna Sotnikova, Alexander Sternfeld, Ayush Kumar Tarun, Paul Teiletche, Jannis Vamvas, Xiaozhe Yao, Hao Zhao Alexander Ilic, Ana Klimovic, Andreas Krause, Caglar Gulcehre, David Rosenthal, Elliott Ash, Florian Tramèr, Joost VandeVondele, Livio Veraldi, Martin Rajman, Thomas Schulthess, Torsten Hoefler, Antoine Bosselut, Martin Jaggi, Imanol Schlag</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Apertus, a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address two systemic shortcomings in today's open model ecosystem: data compliance and multilingual representation. Unlike many prior models that release weights without reproducible data pipelines or regard for content-owner rights, Apertus models are pretrained exclusively on openly available data, retroactively respecting robots.txt exclusions and filtering for non-permissive, toxic, and personally identifiable content. To mitigate risks of memorization, we adopt the Goldfish objective during pretraining, strongly suppressing verbatim recall of data while retaining downstream task performance. The Apertus models also expand multilingual coverage, training on 15T tokens from over 1800 languages, with ~40% of pretraining data allocated to non-English content. Released at 8B and 70B scales, Apertus approaches state-of-the-art results among fully open models on multilingual benchmarks, rivalling or surpassing open-weight counterparts. Beyond model weights, we release all scientific artifacts from our development cycle with a permissive license, including data preparation scripts, checkpoints, evaluation suites, and training code, enabling transparent audit and extension.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 17:59:21 +0000 - SimpleVLA-RL: Scaling VLA Training via Reinforcement Learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09674 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09674.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haozhan Li, Yuxin Zuo, Jiale Yu, Yuhao Zhang, Zhaohui Yang, Kaiyan Zhang, Xuekai Zhu, Yuchen Zhang, Tianxing Chen, Ganqu Cui, Dehui Wang, Dingxiang Luo, Yuchen Fan, Youbang Sun, Jia Zeng, Jiangmiao Pang, Shanghang Zhang, Yu Wang, Yao Mu, Bowen Zhou, Ning Ding</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 68</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation. Despite substantial progress enabled by large-scale pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these models face two fundamental challenges: (i) the scarcity and high cost of large-scale human-operated robotic trajectories required for SFT scaling, and (ii) limited generalization to tasks involving distribution shift. Recent breakthroughs in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) can dramatically enhance step-by-step reasoning capabilities, raising a natural question: Can RL similarly improve the long-horizon step-by-step action planning of VLA? In this work, we introduce SimpleVLA-RL, an efficient RL framework tailored for VLA models. Building upon veRL, we introduce VLA-specific trajectory sampling, scalable parallelization, multi-environment rendering, and optimized loss computation. When applied to OpenVLA-OFT, SimpleVLA-RL achieves SoTA performance on LIBERO and even outperforms pi_0 on RoboTwin 1.0\&2.0 with the exploration-enhancing strategies we introduce. SimpleVLA-RL not only reduces dependence on large-scale data and enables robust generalization, but also remarkably surpasses SFT in real-world tasks. Moreover, we identify a novel phenomenon ``pushcut'' during RL training, wherein the policy discovers previously unseen patterns beyond those seen in the previous training process. Github: https://github.com/PRIME-RL/SimpleVLA-RL</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09674 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:59:17 +0000 + AToken: A Unified Tokenizer for Vision + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14476 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14476.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiasen Lu, Liangchen Song, Mingze Xu, Byeongjoo Ahn, Yanjun Wang, Chen Chen, Afshin Dehghan, Yinfei Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present AToken, the first unified visual tokenizer that achieves both high-fidelity reconstruction and semantic understanding across images, videos, and 3D assets. Unlike existing tokenizers that specialize in either reconstruction or understanding for single modalities, AToken encodes these diverse visual inputs into a shared 4D latent space, unifying both tasks and modalities in a single framework. Specifically, we introduce a pure transformer architecture with 4D rotary position embeddings to process visual inputs of arbitrary resolutions and temporal durations. To ensure stable training, we introduce an adversarial-free training objective that combines perceptual and Gram matrix losses, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. By employing a progressive training curriculum, AToken gradually expands from single images, videos, and 3D, and supports both continuous and discrete latent tokens. AToken achieves 0.21 rFID with 82.2% ImageNet accuracy for images, 3.01 rFVD with 32.6% MSRVTT retrieval for videos, and 28.19 PSNR with 90.9% classification accuracy for 3D. In downstream applications, AToken enables both visual generation tasks (e.g., image generation with continuous and discrete tokens, text-to-video generation, image-to-3D synthesis) and understanding tasks (e.g., multimodal LLMs), achieving competitive performance across all benchmarks. These results shed light on the next-generation multimodal AI systems built upon unified visual tokenization.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14476 + Wed, 17 Sep 2025 23:11:18 +0000 - SpatialVID: A Large-Scale Video Dataset with Spatial Annotations - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09676 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09676.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiahao Wang, Yufeng Yuan, Rujie Zheng, Youtian Lin, Jian Gao, Lin-Zhuo Chen, Yajie Bao, Yi Zhang, Chang Zeng, Yanxi Zhou, Xiaoxiao Long, Hao Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Xun Cao, Yao Yao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Significant progress has been made in spatial intelligence, spanning both spatial reconstruction and world exploration. However, the scalability and real-world fidelity of current models remain severely constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality training data. While several datasets provide camera pose information, they are typically limited in scale, diversity, and annotation richness, particularly for real-world dynamic scenes with ground-truth camera motion. To this end, we collect SpatialVID, a dataset consists of a large corpus of in-the-wild videos with diverse scenes, camera movements and dense 3D annotations such as per-frame camera poses, depth, and motion instructions. Specifically, we collect more than 21,000 hours of raw video, and process them into 2.7 million clips through a hierarchical filtering pipeline, totaling 7,089 hours of dynamic content. A subsequent annotation pipeline enriches these clips with detailed spatial and semantic information, including camera poses, depth maps, dynamic masks, structured captions, and serialized motion instructions. Analysis of SpatialVID's data statistics reveals a richness and diversity that directly foster improved model generalization and performance, establishing it as a key asset for the video and 3D vision research community.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09676 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:59:31 +0000 + MultiEdit: Advancing Instruction-based Image Editing on Diverse and Challenging Tasks + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14638 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14638.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mingsong Li, Lin Liu, Hongjun Wang, Haoxing Chen, Xijun Gu, Shizhan Liu, Dong Gong, Junbo Zhao, Zhenzhong Lan, Jianguo Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Current instruction-based image editing (IBIE) methods struggle with challenging editing tasks, as both editing types and sample counts of existing datasets are limited. Moreover, traditional dataset construction often contains noisy image-caption pairs, which may introduce biases and limit model capabilities in complex editing scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce MultiEdit, a comprehensive dataset featuring over 107K high-quality image editing samples. It encompasses 6 challenging editing tasks through a diverse collection of 18 non-style-transfer editing types and 38 style transfer operations, covering a spectrum from sophisticated style transfer to complex semantic operations like person reference editing and in-image text editing. We employ a novel dataset construction pipeline that utilizes two multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to generate visual-adaptive editing instructions and produce high-fidelity edited images, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning foundational open-source models with our MultiEdit-Train set substantially improves models' performance on sophisticated editing tasks in our proposed MultiEdit-Test benchmark, while effectively preserving their capabilities on the standard editing benchmark. We believe MultiEdit provides a valuable resource for advancing research into more diverse and challenging IBIE capabilities. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/inclusionAI/MultiEdit.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14638 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 05:33:38 +0000 - FLUX-Reason-6M & PRISM-Bench: A Million-Scale Text-to-Image Reasoning Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09680 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.09680.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Rongyao Fang, Aldrich Yu, Chengqi Duan, Linjiang Huang, Shuai Bai, Yuxuan Cai, Kun Wang, Si Liu, Xihui Liu, Hongsheng Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 35</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The advancement of open-source text-to-image (T2I) models has been hindered by the absence of large-scale, reasoning-focused datasets and comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, resulting in a performance gap compared to leading closed-source systems. To address this challenge, We introduce FLUX-Reason-6M and PRISM-Bench (Precise and Robust Image Synthesis Measurement Benchmark). FLUX-Reason-6M is a massive dataset consisting of 6 million high-quality FLUX-generated images and 20 million bilingual (English and Chinese) descriptions specifically designed to teach complex reasoning. The image are organized according to six key characteristics: Imagination, Entity, Text rendering, Style, Affection, and Composition, and design explicit Generation Chain-of-Thought (GCoT) to provide detailed breakdowns of image generation steps. The whole data curation takes 15,000 A100 GPU days, providing the community with a resource previously unattainable outside of large industrial labs. PRISM-Bench offers a novel evaluation standard with seven distinct tracks, including a formidable Long Text challenge using GCoT. Through carefully designed prompts, it utilizes advanced vision-language models for nuanced human-aligned assessment of prompt-image alignment and image aesthetics. Our extensive evaluation of 19 leading models on PRISM-Bench reveals critical performance gaps and highlights specific areas requiring improvement. Our dataset, benchmark, and evaluation code are released to catalyze the next wave of reasoning-oriented T2I generation. Project page: https://flux-reason-6m.github.io/ .</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09680 - Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:59:59 +0000 + Reasoning over Boundaries: Enhancing Specification Alignment via Test-time Delibration + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14760 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14760.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haoran Zhang, Yafu Li, Xuyang Hu, Dongrui Liu, Zhilin Wang, Bo Li, Yu Cheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 48</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in diverse real-world scenarios, each governed by bespoke behavioral and safety specifications (spec) custom-tailored by users or organizations. These spec, categorized into safety-spec and behavioral-spec, vary across scenarios and evolve with changing preferences and requirements. We formalize this challenge as specification alignment, focusing on LLMs' ability to follow dynamic, scenario-specific spec from both behavioral and safety perspectives. To address this challenge, we propose Align3, a lightweight method that employs Test-Time Deliberation (TTD) with hierarchical reflection and revision to reason over the specification boundaries. We further present SpecBench, a unified benchmark for measuring specification alignment, covering 5 scenarios, 103 spec, and 1,500 prompts. Experiments on 15 reasoning and 18 instruct models with several TTD methods, including Self-Refine, TPO, and MoreThink, yield three key findings: (i) test-time deliberation enhances specification alignment; (ii) Align3 advances the safety-helpfulness trade-off frontier with minimal overhead; (iii) SpecBench effectively reveals alignment gaps. These results highlight the potential of test-time deliberation as an effective strategy for reasoning over the real-world specification boundaries.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14760 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:08:53 +0000 + + + EchoVLM: Dynamic Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Model for Universal Ultrasound Intelligence + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14977 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.14977.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chaoyin She, Ruifang Lu, Lida Chen, Wei Wang, Qinghua Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Ultrasound imaging has become the preferred imaging modality for early cancer screening due to its advantages of non-ionizing radiation, low cost, and real-time imaging capabilities. However, conventional ultrasound diagnosis heavily relies on physician expertise, presenting challenges of high subjectivity and low diagnostic efficiency. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer promising solutions for this issue, but existing general-purpose models demonstrate limited knowledge in ultrasound medical tasks, with poor generalization in multi-organ lesion recognition and low efficiency across multi-task diagnostics. To address these limitations, we propose EchoVLM, a vision-language model specifically designed for ultrasound medical imaging. The model employs a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture trained on data spanning seven anatomical regions. This design enables the model to perform multiple tasks, including ultrasound report generation, diagnosis and visual question-answering (VQA). The experimental results demonstrated that EchoVLM achieved significant improvements of 10.15 and 4.77 points in BLEU-1 scores and ROUGE-1 scores respectively compared to Qwen2-VL on the ultrasound report generation task. These findings suggest that EchoVLM has substantial potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy in ultrasound imaging, thereby providing a viable technical solution for future clinical applications. Source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Asunatan/EchoVLM.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14977 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:07:53 +0000 + + + Mind the Gap: A Closer Look at Tokenization for Multiple-Choice Question Answering with LLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15020 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.15020.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Minh Duc Bui, Katharina von der Wense</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> When evaluating large language models (LLMs) with multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), it is common to end the prompt with the string "Answer:" to facilitate automated answer extraction via next-token probabilities. However, there is no consensus on how to tokenize the space following the colon, often overlooked as a trivial choice. In this paper, we uncover accuracy differences of up to 11% due to this (seemingly irrelevant) tokenization variation as well as reshuffled model rankings, raising concerns about the reliability of LLM comparisons in prior work. Surprisingly, we are able to recommend one specific strategy -- tokenizing the space together with the answer letter -- as we observe consistent and statistically significant performance improvements. Additionally, it improves model calibration, enhancing the reliability of the model's confidence estimates. Our findings underscore the importance of careful evaluation design and highlight the need for standardized, transparent evaluation protocols to ensure reliable and comparable results.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15020 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:47:58 +0000 + + + WorldForge: Unlocking Emergent 3D/4D Generation in Video Diffusion Model via Training-Free Guidance + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15130 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.15130.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chenxi Song, Yanming Yang, Tong Zhao, Ruibo Li, Chi Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 23</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent video diffusion models demonstrate strong potential in spatial intelligence tasks due to their rich latent world priors. However, this potential is hindered by their limited controllability and geometric inconsistency, creating a gap between their strong priors and their practical use in 3D/4D tasks. As a result, current approaches often rely on retraining or fine-tuning, which risks degrading pretrained knowledge and incurs high computational costs. To address this, we propose WorldForge, a training-free, inference-time framework composed of three tightly coupled modules. Intra-Step Recursive Refinement introduces a recursive refinement mechanism during inference, which repeatedly optimizes network predictions within each denoising step to enable precise trajectory injection. Flow-Gated Latent Fusion leverages optical flow similarity to decouple motion from appearance in the latent space and selectively inject trajectory guidance into motion-related channels. Dual-Path Self-Corrective Guidance compares guided and unguided denoising paths to adaptively correct trajectory drift caused by noisy or misaligned structural signals. Together, these components inject fine-grained, trajectory-aligned guidance without training, achieving both accurate motion control and photorealistic content generation. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate our method's superiority in realism, trajectory consistency, and visual fidelity. This work introduces a novel plug-and-play paradigm for controllable video synthesis, offering a new perspective on leveraging generative priors for spatial intelligence.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15130 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:40:47 +0000 + + + Unleashing the Potential of Multimodal LLMs for Zero-Shot Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15178 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.15178.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zaiquan Yang, Yuhao Liu, Gerhard Hancke, Rynson W. H. Lau</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Spatio-temporal video grounding (STVG) aims at localizing the spatio-temporal tube of a video, as specified by the input text query. In this paper, we utilize multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to explore a zero-shot solution in STVG. We reveal two key insights about MLLMs: (1) MLLMs tend to dynamically assign special tokens, referred to as grounding tokens, for grounding the text query; and (2) MLLMs often suffer from suboptimal grounding due to the inability to fully integrate the cues in the text query (e.g., attributes, actions) for inference. Based on these insights, we propose a MLLM-based zero-shot framework for STVG, which includes novel decomposed spatio-temporal highlighting (DSTH) and temporal-augmented assembling (TAS) strategies to unleash the reasoning ability of MLLMs. The DSTH strategy first decouples the original query into attribute and action sub-queries for inquiring the existence of the target both spatially and temporally. It then uses a novel logit-guided re-attention (LRA) module to learn latent variables as spatial and temporal prompts, by regularizing token predictions for each sub-query. These prompts highlight attribute and action cues, respectively, directing the model's attention to reliable spatial and temporal related visual regions. In addition, as the spatial grounding by the attribute sub-query should be temporally consistent, we introduce the TAS strategy to assemble the predictions using the original video frames and the temporal-augmented frames as inputs to help improve temporal consistency. We evaluate our method on various MLLMs, and show that it outperforms SOTA methods on three common STVG benchmarks. The code will be available at https://github.com/zaiquanyang/LLaVA_Next_STVG.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15178 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:35:50 +0000 + + + Understand Before You Generate: Self-Guided Training for Autoregressive Image Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15185 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.15185.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiaoyu Yue, Zidong Wang, Yuqing Wang, Wenlong Zhang, Xihui Liu, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Luping Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 26</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of high-quality visual representations in image generation and have highlighted the limitations of generative models in image understanding. As a generative paradigm originally designed for natural language, autoregressive models face similar challenges. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation into the mechanisms of applying the next-token prediction paradigm to the visual domain. We identify three key properties that hinder the learning of high-level visual semantics: local and conditional dependence, inter-step semantic inconsistency, and spatial invariance deficiency. We show that these issues can be effectively addressed by introducing self-supervised objectives during training, leading to a novel training framework, Self-guided Training for AutoRegressive models (ST-AR). Without relying on pre-trained representation models, ST-AR significantly enhances the image understanding ability of autoregressive models and leads to improved generation quality. Specifically, ST-AR brings approximately 42% FID improvement for LlamaGen-L and 49% FID improvement for LlamaGen-XL, while maintaining the same sampling strategy.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15185 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:47:40 +0000 + + + Evolving Language Models without Labels: Majority Drives Selection, Novelty Promotes Variation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15194 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.15194.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yujun Zhou, Zhenwen Liang, Haolin Liu, Wenhao Yu, Kishan Panaganti, Linfeng Song, Dian Yu, Xiangliang Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 31</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), yet real-world deployment demands models that can self-improve without labels or external judges. Existing label-free methods, confidence minimization, self-consistency, or majority-vote objectives, stabilize learning but steadily shrink exploration, causing an entropy collapse: generations become shorter, less diverse, and brittle. Unlike prior approaches such as Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL), which primarily adapt models to the immediate unlabeled dataset at hand, our goal is broader: to enable general improvements without sacrificing the model's inherent exploration capacity and generalization ability, i.e., evolving. We formalize this issue and propose EVolution-Oriented and Label-free Reinforcement Learning (EVOL-RL), a simple rule that couples stability with variation under a label-free setting. EVOL-RL keeps the majority-voted answer as a stable anchor (selection) while adding a novelty-aware reward that favors responses whose reasoning differs from what has already been produced (variation), measured in semantic space. Implemented with GRPO, EVOL-RL also uses asymmetric clipping to preserve strong signals and an entropy regularizer to sustain search. This majority-for-selection + novelty-for-variation design prevents collapse, maintains longer and more informative chains of thought, and improves both pass@1 and pass@n. EVOL-RL consistently outperforms the majority-only TTRL baseline; e.g., training on label-free AIME24 lifts Qwen3-4B-Base AIME25 pass@1 from TTRL's 4.6% to 16.4%, and pass@16 from 18.5% to 37.9%. EVOL-RL not only prevents diversity collapse but also unlocks stronger generalization across domains (e.g., GPQA). Furthermore, we demonstrate that EVOL-RL also boosts performance in the RLVR setting, highlighting its broad applicability.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15194 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:50:04 +0000 + + + FlowRL: Matching Reward Distributions for LLM Reasoning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15207 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.15207.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xuekai Zhu, Daixuan Cheng, Dinghuai Zhang, Hengli Li, Kaiyan Zhang, Che Jiang, Youbang Sun, Ermo Hua, Yuxin Zuo, Xingtai Lv, Qizheng Zhang, Lin Chen, Fanghao Shao, Bo Xue, Yunchong Song, Zhenjie Yang, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong Liu, Bowen Zhou, Hongyuan Mei, Zhouhan Lin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 85</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO and GRPO), which tend to over-optimize dominant reward signals while neglecting less frequent but valid reasoning paths, thus reducing diversity. In contrast, we transform scalar rewards into a normalized target distribution using a learnable partition function, and then minimize the reverse KL divergence between the policy and the target distribution. We implement this idea as a flow-balanced optimization method that promotes diverse exploration and generalizable reasoning trajectories. We conduct experiments on math and code reasoning tasks: FlowRL achieves a significant average improvement of 10.0% over GRPO and 5.1% over PPO on math benchmarks, and performs consistently better on code reasoning tasks. These results highlight reward distribution-matching as a key step toward efficient exploration and diverse reasoning in LLM reinforcement learning.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15207 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:56:36 +0000 + + + RynnVLA-001: Using Human Demonstrations to Improve Robot Manipulation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15212 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.15212.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuming Jiang, Siteng Huang, Shengke Xue, Yaxi Zhao, Jun Cen, Sicong Leng, Kehan Li, Jiayan Guo, Kexiang Wang, Mingxiu Chen, Fan Wang, Deli Zhao, Xin Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper presents RynnVLA-001, a vision-language-action(VLA) model built upon large-scale video generative pretraining from human demonstrations. We propose a novel two-stage pretraining methodology. The first stage, Ego-Centric Video Generative Pretraining, trains an Image-to-Video model on 12M ego-centric manipulation videos to predict future frames conditioned on an initial frame and a language instruction. The second stage, Human-Centric Trajectory-Aware Modeling, extends this by jointly predicting future keypoint trajectories, thereby effectively bridging visual frame prediction with action prediction. Furthermore, to enhance action representation, we propose ActionVAE, a variational autoencoder that compresses sequences of actions into compact latent embeddings, reducing the complexity of the VLA output space. When finetuned on the same downstream robotics datasets, RynnVLA-001 achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating that the proposed pretraining strategy provides a more effective initialization for VLA models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15212 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:58:02 +0000 + + + ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15221 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2509.15221.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhaoyang Liu, JingJing Xie, Zichen Ding, Zehao Li, Bowen Yang, Zhenyu Wu, Xuehui Wang, Qiushi Sun, Shi Liu, Weiyun Wang, Shenglong Ye, Qingyun Li, Zeyue Tian, Gen Luo, Xiangyu Yue, Biqing Qi, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Yu Qiao, Qifeng Chen, Wenhai Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 93</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled computer use agents (CUAs) that operate GUIs autonomously, showing great potential, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, open-source computer use data and foundation models. In this work, we introduce ScaleCUA, a step toward scaling open-source CUAs. It offers a large-scale dataset spanning 6 operating systems and 3 task domains, built via a closed-loop pipeline uniting automated agents with human experts. Trained on this scaled-up data, ScaleCUA can operate seamlessly across platforms. Specifically, it delivers strong gains over baselines (+26.6 on WebArena-Lite-v2, +10.7 on ScreenSpot-Pro) and sets new state-of-the-art results (94.4% on MMBench-GUI L1-Hard, 60.6% on OSWorld-G, 47.4% on WebArena-Lite-v2). These findings underscore the power of data-driven scaling for general-purpose computer use agents. We will release data, models, and code to advance future research: https://github.com/OpenGVLab/ScaleCUA.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15221 + Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:59:22 +0000