Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems yet fail on simpler variants, suggesting they achieve correct outputs through mechanisms fundamentally different from human reasoning. To understand this gap, we synthesize cognitive science research into a taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements spanning reasoning invariants, meta-cognitive controls, representations for organizing reasoning and knowledge, and transformation operations. We introduce a fine-grained evaluation framework and apply it to 192K traces from 18 models across text, vision, and audio, alongside 1,346 human think-aloud traces on a new, domain-agnostic dataset for human-model comparison. We find that models are able to deploy cognitive elements seen in human reasoning but differ in how they use them. Leveraging these patterns, we develop test-time reasoning guidance that automatically scaffolds successful reasoning topologies, improving the accuracy of the strongest models by 9.7 percentage points on ill-structured problems. Meta-analysis of 1.6K LLM reasoning papers reveals the research community concentrates on easily quantifiable elements but rarely targets self-awareness, whose use differs between human and model reasoning. By establishing a shared vocabulary between cognitive science and LLM research, our framework enables diagnosis of reasoning failures and principled development of models that reason through robust cognitive mechanisms rather than spurious shortcuts, while providing tools to test theories of human cognition at scale.
This paper addresses safe coordination of scalar agents with constrained input dynamics over fixed rooted digraphs. We propose a networked Admissibility-Preserving Control (APC) architecture for a common moving output corridor under heterogeneous asymmetric input bounds, wherein the Admissibility-Preserving Input Realization (APIR) generates the physical inputs. In logarithmic barrier coordinates, the closed-loop dynamics form an exact cascade of exponentially decaying realization errors and directed consensus dynamics. We derive direction-specific compatibility conditions that guarantee uniform corridor and input margins, bounded commands, unique complete solutions, and exponential consensus for compact initial sets. The closed-form expression for the agreement value quantifies the effect of the initial APIR mismatch. Under the corresponding compatibility conditions, partial pinning guarantees safe reference tracking whenever the root component contains at least one informed agent. Simulations illustrate the coordination guarantees.
This paper presents a new vision Transformer, called Swin Transformer, that capably serves as a general-purpose backbone for computer vision. Challenges in adapting Transformer from language to vision arise from differences between the two domains, such as large variations in the scale of visual entities and the high resolution of pixels in images compared to words in text. To address these differences, we propose a hierarchical Transformer whose representation is computed with \textbf{S}hifted \textbf{win}dows. The shifted windowing scheme brings greater efficiency by limiting self-attention computation to non-overlapping local windows while also allowing for cross-window connection. This hierarchical architecture has the flexibility to model at various scales and has linear computational complexity with respect to image size. These qualities of Swin Transformer make it compatible with a broad range of vision tasks, including image classification (87.3 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K) and dense prediction tasks such as object detection (58.7 box AP and 51.1 mask AP on COCO test-dev) and semantic segmentation (53.5 mIoU on ADE20K val). Its performance surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin of +2.7 box AP and +2.6 mask AP on COCO, and +3.2 mIoU on ADE20K, demonstrating the potential of Transformer-based models as vision backbones. The hierarchical design and the shifted window approach also prove beneficial for all-MLP architectures. The code and models are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/microsoft/Swin-Transformer}.