Reinforcement learning has become an effective approach for improving video generation, but its success depends heavily on reliable reward models. Existing methods either map videos directly to opaque scalar scores or generate free-form rationales that are not explicitly optimized as the basis of the final judgment. We propose ArtiVidRM, a verifiable, artifact-as-rubrics video reward model that follows an observe-then-score paradigm. It first identifies visible generation artifacts and organizes them into a structured artifact list, then uses these artifacts as explicit rubrics for quality assessment. This intermediate representation grounds each score in concrete video-level evidence, making the reward more interpretable and informative for optimization. We further introduce a multi-reward reinforcement learning strategy to jointly optimize artifact prediction and quality assessment. The reward decomposes into complementary objectives that evaluate artifact prediction quality, including semantic coverage and prediction efficiency, together with a pairwise preference objective that supervises quality ranking through score differences. By jointly optimizing the intermediate artifact representation and the downstream preference prediction, the model learns to produce informative artifact lists while improving the accuracy of video quality assessment. Experiments show that ArtiVidRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on video preference benchmarks, provides effective signals for video diffusion optimization, and enables artifact-guided refinement of closed-source video generators.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks, but remain vulnerable to safety risks such as harmful content generation and jailbreak attacks. Existing safety techniques---including external guardrails, inference-time guidance, and post-training alignment---each face limitations in balancing safety, utility, and controllability. In this work, we propose UpSafe$^\circ$C, a unified framework for enhancing LLM safety through safety-aware upcycling. Our approach first identifies safety-critical layers and upcycles them into a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure, where the router acts as a soft guardrail that selectively activates original MLPs and added safety experts. We further introduce a two-stage SFT strategy to strengthen safety discrimination while preserving general capabilities. To enable flexible control at inference time, we introduce a safety temperature mechanism, allowing dynamic adjustment of the trade-off between safety and utility. Experiments across multiple benchmarks, base model, and model scales demonstrate that UpSafe$^\circ$C achieves robust safety improvements against harmful and jailbreak inputs, while maintaining competitive performance on general tasks. Moreover, analysis shows that safety temperature provides fine-grained inference-time control that achieves controllable trade-off between utility and safety. Our results highlight a new direction for LLM safety: moving from static alignment toward dynamic, modular, and inference-aware control. Code: https://github.com/HansSunY/UpSafe.
Yossi Azar, Junhao Gan, Shahar Lewkowicz, Xiao Sun, Seeun William Umboh
Online optimization with delays has emerged as a powerful paradigm with numerous applica- tions, including matching, caching, server management, network design, and set cover. In most of these problems, competitive algorithms are known for arbitrary monotone delay functions, even when different requests are associated with different delay functions. The notable exception is online matching with delays, where all previously known algorithms achieving constant or polylogarithmic competitive ratios require the delay functions to be identical, either linear or concave, and known in advance. We study the online minimum-cost perfect matching with delays problem on general metrics. We introduce the broad class of noncrossing delay functions, which strictly generalizes the classic setting of identical concave delay functions while naturally modeling scenarios in which different requests may experience different delay costs. We present the first deterministic $O(1)$-competitive algorithm for the single-location online matching problem with noncrossing delay functions in the non-clairvoyant setting as well as a randomized $O(lognlogΔ+log^2Δ)$-competitive algorithm of an arbitrary metric space where $n$ is the number of points of the metric space and $Δ$ is its aspect ratio. Our result allows each request to have an arbitrary noncrossing delay function, thereby simultaneously removing the assumptions of identical delay functions, concavity, and clairvoyance that were required by all previous constant or polylogarithmic-competitive algorithms.
Sherry Choi, Sitao Sunny Li, Joseph Romero, Lillian Chin, Ashwin G. Ramayya, Allison M. Okamura, Ava Chen
Motor responses evoked by noxious stimulation are used to assess neurological function in hospitalized patients with disorders of consciousness. In standard bedside assessments, these stimuli are applied manually, resulting in substantial variation in force, duration, frequency, and location. Here, we present OUCH (Objective, Uniform, Controlled Haptic stimulation), a wrist-worn device that uses pneumatic actuation to deliver noxious mechanical stimuli. OUCH combines stacked pneumatic pouch actuators, a rigid indenter, and a compliant spacer designed to buckle at a set load, so that the indenter contacts the skin only during actuation. We characterize the device using blocked force tests, clinician evaluation, finite element analysis, and a deformable pressure testbed, and benchmark it against a commercially available handheld pressure algometer. At 200 kPa pouch inflation pressure, our indenter concentrated its load into an estimated contact pressure of 18,500 kPa, over 25 times that of the algometer tip, while requiring less total force. On the deformable testbed, it localized deformation near the surface, while deformation at depth remained comparable to the algometer. As a result, in preliminary perceptual testing, our indenter elicited discomfort at approximately 89% lower applied force than the algometer, demonstrating the feasibility of evoking discomfort with a compact, wearable soft actuator. These results show that combining pneumatic actuation with designed contact geometry enables controlled, repeatable noxious stimulation at the wrist, providing a foundation for objective neurological assessment.
Large language models are deployed as long-horizon agents that compose diverse tools across MCP services into executable workflows. Existing MCP environment-scaling methods are data-centric: they first synthesize a database and scenario, then derive tools and tasks from them. As a result, tool interfaces may not match real ones, tool compositions are not grounded in execution, and tasks rarely span more than one environment. We propose ToolSpace, a tool-centric framework that reverses this order. ToolSpace mines data, state, and retry dependencies from adjacent calls in execution traces of real MCP services and open agent corpora, using deterministic rules rather than LLM judgment, and clusters the resulting weighted tool-composition graph into environments. Databases are synthesized only for state-mutating environments, while query and stateless tools replay recorded returns. ToolSpace then performs state-aware random walks with rollback and decompiles each chain into a natural-language task with assertion-based checks, keeping only samples that replay successfully from the initial state. Applied to AutomationBench and tau3-Bench Banking, the pipeline produces harder Pro versions on which 7 frontier models drop by up to 38.2 points. Across seven long-horizon tool-use benchmarks, ToolSpace raises Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from 23.0 to 41.0 average score (43.2 with RL) and GLM-5.2 from 44.6 to 56.6, on par with Claude Opus 5. Ablations show that execution-witnessed edges clearly outperform LLM-judged ones, and performance keeps improving with data and environment scale.
Learning-based approaches have increasingly been explored for SAT solving, with particular attention to improving branching decisions in conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) solvers. These approaches derive branching guidance either from static structural properties of SAT formulas or from dynamic signals obtained through solver feedback and execution traces. However, these forms of supervision provide limited evidence about state-dependent branching effects, while different outcome measures may favor different branching choices. To address these limitations, we propose SAT-ACT, an outcome-derived learning framework for CDCL branching. We design three complementary outcome comparison criteria to extract action preferences from independent branching action rollouts initiated at the same solver state. The criteria identify preferences supported by the outcomes and leave comparisons unresolved when the evidence is insufficient or conflicting, instead of forcing an ordering using a predefined scalar metric. A state-conditioned network learns branching priorities from the extracted preferences and uses them to guide CDCL search directly without online action rollouts. We further introduce non-dominated heuristic action supervision, which retains the solver-selected action as a training target only when it remains non-dominated under these preferences. Solver-level experiments show that SAT-ACT consistently reduces CDCL search costs on three SAT families and improves PAR-2 on the SAT Competition benchmarks.
Rapid advances in cowork agents are shifting human-AI collaboration toward real-world automation, delivering software, designs, and other artifacts. However, such productivity work demands both high-quality delivery on complex productivity tasks and continued monitoring and decision-making over long horizons, a combination that remains an open challenge. We introduce CoworkOS, a general-purpose harness for long-horizon work that separates task strategy from execution management: the model decides actions, delegation, and acceptance, while the runtime maintains state and feedback. Its three-layer architecture enables direct execution or delegation to Subagents, synchronously or asynchronously, under stable responsibilities. Through a shared application layer, humans and agents inspect and revise the same evolving documents, presentations, CAD models, and Blender scenes, so human-in-the-loop participation can enter both through conversation and through direct modification of the work itself. To sustain continuity across agents and sessions, CoworkOS further introduces hierarchical workspaces and persistent semantic memory, so working files, key decisions, and long-running Job logs remain shareable, reusable, and resumable after interruption. Across 12 benchmarks and 6 categories of real-world applications, CoworkOS proves highly competitive with frontier agent applications such as Codex and DeepSeek Harness. As a sustained-work case study, CoworkOS uses GLM-5.3 as its backbone to conduct RSI-driven automated post-training on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. Over five rounds, the model's average score across eight benchmarks rose from 33.19 to 42.95 (+9.76). Looking ahead, we believe CoworkOS opens a meaningful path toward general cowork-agent intelligence.
Governing equations provide an interpretable description of the mechanisms underlying complex network dynamics, yet their discovery from observational data remains challenging when shared community-level dynamics coexist with individual-level variations and the relevant functional structures may be absent from the initial candidate library or not explicitly specified in advance. Here we formulate this task as a hierarchical law-discovery problem and introduce SAGE, a large language model-guided self-reflective agent framework for discovering community-shared governing laws and individual-specific dynamical variations. SAGE organizes equation discovery into an iterative Library-Discovery-Review process that first identifies shared community-level structures and then resolves node-specific residual dynamics, while adaptively refining the candidate space to introduce missing dynamical terms when needed. This hierarchical and interpretable formulation enables SAGE to distinguish shared community-level dynamics from individual-level variations and to reveal the mechanisms underlying complex network dynamics. Across two synthetic networks and four real-world networks spanning mobile communication, brain electrophysiology, power grids and urban rail transit, SAGE recovers compact and interpretable governing equations, reproduces observed system dynamics and outperforms representative equation-discovery baselines. The framework remains robust under incomplete observations and can transfer community-level governing laws to nodes with entirely missing observations. These results establish a hierarchical and adaptive approach for disentangling shared and individual dynamical mechanisms in community-structured complex networks.
Robust multimodal perception for soft robotic grasping is challenged by modality-dependent noise, semantic ambiguity, and limited coordinated multisensory data. We introduce Soma, a dataset containing 100 objects, 1,000 continuous grasping trajectories, and 74,914 multimodal samples grouped by software acquisition cycle, spanning remote RGB, hand RGB, depth, tactile, IMU, and structured text observations. We also collect Soma-Success, an independent grasp-outcome dataset with 1,000 trials (998 retained after quality control), to evaluate frozen-encoder transfer for post-hoc grasp outcome classification and early grasp success prediction. Built on Soma, SomaAlign learns multimodal representations in three stages: masked reconstruction estimates relative modality reliability; reliability-aware contrastive alignment uses pair-specific adaptive temperatures to adjust alignment sharpness; and conflict-aware semantic constraints improve intra-sample cross-modal consistency while preserving global feature geometry. SomaAlign achieves an average Recall@10 of 90.66% across 30 directed cross-modal retrieval tasks. The learned representations also support physical attribute recognition, multimodal question answering, cross-modal generation, and cross-dataset transfer to grasp outcome prediction. On Soma-Success, frozen SomaAlign encoders with lightweight probes achieve 94.59% post-hoc classification accuracy and 84.07% early prediction accuracy. Together, Soma, Soma-Success, and SomaAlign provide a data and representation-learning foundation for robust and transferable multimodal perception in soft robotic manipulation.
A source-based quiz can help a computing teacher identify material to explain again, but its report must preserve the limits of the evidence behind that decision. We present ClassQuest, a prototype connecting teacher-reviewed question drafts, private student responses, topic reports and targeted retries. A Year 10 classroom account of an earlier prototype supplies 20 usefulness ratings from 24 invitees, with a mean of 8.0 and median of 9 on a ten-point scale. A Boolean-logic episode documents how immediate feedback, a teacher explanation and a fresh question were combined. We separate this account from a completed technical audit and reusable teaching guide. An exhaustive single-item audit found no count mismatches across 5,456 constructed response configurations, while diagnostic cases exposed a retry increase caused entirely by changing participation and a progression suggestion based on one learner's three answers. A further case shows that an unoffered retry can be labelled missing. A separate reporting companion distinguishes opportunity to respond, pending review and matched retry cohorts. Its completion-sensitivity check matched an independent oracle in 46,375 constructed states across roster sizes 1-30, identifying when unknown responses can change a reporting band. Our contributions are a source-linked formative workflow, executable examples of interpretation failures, and reporting and teaching materials for examining those failures. Neither the questionnaire nor the audit establishes improved learning; the findings identify reporting requirements and practical directions for formative teaching.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for education, recruitment, workplace decision support, and other consequential applications, making pre-deployment social-bias detection essential. Yet major benchmarks are English-centred or translated, focus mainly on negative stereotypes, and may miss linguistic and cultural variation. We investigate gender, racial, and religious bias using 12,000 locally written Reddit posts in English, Spanish, French, and German. Only search terms are translated, preserving local context. The dataset is balanced by language and category; English gender is additionally balanced by stereotype valence. Three open-weight and three proprietary API-based models are evaluated with a two-blank design that reduces grammatical-gender cues. Religion has the highest absolute choice imbalance in every model-language condition. Spanish is highest for gender, whereas German is highest for race and religion. The evaluated API models score below the open-weight models throughout. Negative English-gender items exceed positive items; Australian and Mexican contexts exceed their Canadian and Spanish counterparts. These descriptive differences measure choice concentration, not stereotype endorsement or causal country effects. The crossed patterns show how aggregate scores can conceal category- and context-specific behaviour, motivating closer inspection before deployment.
Prompt engineering is commonly used to encourage text-to-image models to generate more detailed images. However, it does not provide reliable, continuous, or disentangled control. We analyze feature tokens produced with and without detail-enhancing prompts across six diffusion transformers and observe a common pattern: these prompts tend to increase the entropy of each token's energy distribution while largely preserving its ordering. That is, flattening the distribution increases the level of detail. Motivated by this counter-intuitive finding, we introduce a simple training-free approach that continuously adjusts the level of detail according to a scalar. Specifically, it shifts the squared channel magnitudes of each token toward a higher entropy distribution with a time-aware scheduler to concentrate the intervention at intermediate sampling steps. Across extensive experiments on different types of diffusion transformers, we show that our approach provides continuous control over detail metrics while largely preserving image quality and semantic structure. It requires only a few lines of code and adds negligible inference time overhead.
Minhao Sun, Xian-Ling Mao, Eric Tao, Zi-Ao Ma, Zhijing Wu
On-policy distillation trains search agents with teacher feedback on student-generated trajectories. Recent methods augment the teacher's context with supporting evidence, reference answers, or hindsight information. However, this privileged information may allow the teacher to rely on facts that the student cannot reliably recover from its current state. The resulting information-state mismatch can lead the teacher to undervalue retrieval that helps the student establish those facts. To address this mismatch, we introduce Information-State-Aware Distillation (ISA-Distill), which adapts teacher feedback to the student's factual recoverability. ISA-Distill estimates how reliably the student can recover action-relevant knowledge and derives teacher feedback for the same sampled action from two complementary views. The fact-use view supplies the teacher with the relevant fact, producing feedback that guides the student in using knowledge. The evidence-seeking view instead presents the information need, producing feedback that guides the student in acquiring supporting evidence. The two signals are weighted toward fact use when recoverability is high and toward evidence seeking when it is low, and the resulting feedback guides policy optimization. Experiments across diverse QA benchmarks and model scales demonstrate improved answer accuracy and retrieval efficiency. Our code and model checkpoints will be open-sourced.
End-to-end planners decode the ego trajectory either by coordinate regression, which is fast but blends plausible maneuvers into one trajectory that may follow none of them, or by diffusion and flow matching, which model the trajectory distribution but need several inference steps. Drifting models move this iteration into training: a one-step generator learns to follow an attraction--repulsion field between generated and ground-truth samples. Drifting was developed for class-conditional image generation, where every class supplies many positive samples. In planning, every scene is its own condition. Pooling scenes would attract the generated trajectories of one scene to the ground truth of unrelated scenes, whereas computing the field per scene leaves a single positive, the expert trajectory. Mutual repulsion then holds the generated trajectories on a shell around it, so any single generated trajectory deviates from the ground truth. We present DriftingPlanner, a trajectory planner trained with the drifting loss alone, without any coordinate regression term. It computes the field per scene and removes the shell at inference: it decodes every noise vector together with its negation in one batched pass, and averaging each antithetic pair cancels the linear part of the displacement from the shell center. On NAVSIM navtest, DriftingPlanner reaches a state-of-the-art 93.75 PDMS, and with single-step inference its drifting decoder comes within 0.13 PDMS of the best diffusion or flow matching setting, which needs ten inference steps.
Randomized Smoothing (RS) is a prominent technique for certifying the robustness of neural networks against adversarial perturbations. With RS, achieving high accuracy at small radii requires a small noise variance, while achieving high accuracy at large radii requires a large noise variance. However, the global noise variance used in the standard RS formulation leads to a fundamental limitation: there exists no global noise variance that simultaneously achieves strong performance at both small and large radii. To break through the global variance limitation, we propose a dual RS framework which enables input-dependent noise variances. To achieve that, we first prove that RS remains valid with input-dependent noise variances, provided the variance is locally constant around each input. Building on this result, we introduce two components: (i) a variance estimator predicts an optimal noise variance for each input, (ii) this estimated variance is then used by a standard RS classifier. The variance estimator is independently smoothed via RS to ensure local constancy, enabling flexible design. We also introduce training strategies to iteratively optimize the two components. Experiments on CIFAR-10 demonstrate that our dual RS method provides strong performance for both small and large radii-unattainable with global noise variance-while incurring only a 60% computational overhead at inference. Moreover, it outperforms prior input-dependent noise approaches across most radii, with gains at radii 0.5, 0.75, and 1.0 of 15.6%, 20.0%, and 15.7%. On ImageNet, dual RS remains effective across all radii, with advantages of 8.6%, 17.1%, and 9.1% at radii 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5. Additionally, the dual RS framework provides a routing perspective for certified robustness, improving the accuracy-robustness trade-off with off-the-shelf expert RS models.
The Costs of Early-career Disciplinary Pivots: Evidence from Ph.D. Admissions
Sidney Xiang, Nicholas David, Dallas Card, Wenhao Sun, Daniel M Romero, Misha Teplitskiy
AI 速览：分析17万份博士申请发现，申请者从先前学位转向语义距离更远的目标项目时，录取概率更低，且入学后毕业更慢，但发表和引用表现无显著差异。
Science often advances when researchers pivot from one discipline to another and import new ideas. However, for established researchers, such pivots are associated with fewer publications and citations. Here, we investigate pivoting at the beginning of a research career--doctoral admissions--when the benefits of importing ideas might outweigh the switching costs. Analyzing 171,347 PhD applications at a large research university from 2013 to 2023, we measured the semantic distance between each applicant's prior degree and target program. Applicants who pivot further had lower undergraduate grades and, controlling for academic and demographic predictors, lower admission chances: the average pivot corresponds to a 5.3% lower admission probability (0.80 percentage points). Among enrollees, the average pivoter takes longer to graduate than non-pivoters, with a 10.7% lower graduation hazard, and similar publication and citation counts on average and at the tails. Our results suggest that pivoting at the outset of research careers, even if it benefits research communities, comes with significant costs to individuals.
The Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction model serves as a critical tool for ensuring the quality of software development and enhancing software performance. It assists development teams in promptly identifying and addressing potential issues by predicting whether code submissions may introduce defects. However, due to the existence of data noise and insufficient semantic connections in real-world scenarios, existing approaches face challenges in accurately identifying the code commits that introduce defects and capturing the potential semantic relationships. To address these challenges, we propose the BIC- Hunter(Bug-Inducing Commits Hunter) model, which mitigates data noise and improves semantic understanding, thereby enhancing the accuracy of bug-inducing commit identification. BIC - Hunter model consists of two components: a data denoising component and a semantic relationship capturing component. Specifically, the data denoising component addresses the challenges posed by inaccurate annotations and inconsistencies in real-world data, enhancing the reliability of training data and improving overall model robustness. The semantic relation- ship capturing component constructs homogeneous graphs and applies graph convolutional networks to facilitate a more comprehensive analysis of code context, enabling the identification of defects caused by code commits and enhancing the confidence in pinpointing their root causes. Experimental studies on a large-scale dataset integrated from three open-source datasets show that BIC- Hunter exhibits outstanding performance. BIC- Hunter outperforms the state-of-the-art by 6.16%, 7.13%, and 5.53% on Recall@1, Recall@2, and Recall@3, respectively, while the MFR index increases by 8.43% to 32.82%. These results demonstrate the superior capability of our method in identifying bug-inducing commits.
Ping Luo, Jiahuan Wang, Ziqing Wen, Kele Xu, Dongsheng Li, Tao Sun
In natural science applications, federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of models that approximate solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) for repeated use in distributed settings. However, the input conditions of FL-PDE training samples involve multiple coupled parameters, making data heterogeneity across clients difficult to analyse. We propose solution-space PDE-Dirichlet, which groups existing solution labels into task-specific bins and distributes samples using the classical Dirichlet allocation rule in FL, providing a common partitioning approach across PDE tasks. Theoretical analysis shows an association between differences in solution-bin composition and gradient disagreement, while experiments on three controlled operators and four public simulation datasets quantify the relationships between this heterogeneity, gradient disagreement and prediction error. Based on this connection, we develop Solution-Bin Controlled Federated Optimization, which uses pooled bin-gradient prototypes to correct the component of client gradients associated with bin composition while preserving the sample-weighted training objective. Experiments on low-viscosity Burgers and Darcy flow show that this correction reduces prediction error compared with federated averaging and narrows the gap from bin-balanced IID training.
Text-to-motion models generate motion only for the skeletons they were trained on, while a new character arrives as a skeleton file and nothing else. We study text-to-motion for skeletons unseen in training, without clips of the character, templates, retargeting or fine-tuning. We present TopX, a 73M-parameter flow-matching transformer that generates joint rotations and a root trajectory for any skeleton from its kinematic tree, rest pose and joint names. Motion is normalised by the rest pose and the size of the skeleton, and the rest pose is encoded as a world-frame descriptor that is independent of how the rig's author oriented each joint, while rest conventions are randomised during training. Attention is factorised over the joints and the frames of a motion. Across joints, queries and keys are rotated by HK-RoPE, a heat-kernel rotary encoding of the skeleton graph that is defined for every tree and does not change with the order of its joints or the eigenbasis of its Laplacian; across frames, they are rotated by a rotary encoding of frame order. To evaluate this generalisation, we build SkelShift, which unifies four motion corpora under one codec and holds out whole skeletons, tree classes and species, so that each test bucket isolates one kind of skeleton shift: topology, joint count, body plan, species or rig source. It scores motion quality without a learned evaluator. A single model animates every benchmark skeleton (4--117 joints) directly from its skeleton file and generates up to 240 frames. On held-out game species its motion is about as close to the real clips as two halves of the real clips are to each other (kernel distance 0.127 against 0.124), and text-to-motion retrieval reaches R@1 0.953, compared with 0.929 for real motion. Project page: https://chdtevior.github.io/TopX-page/.
Ziqing Wen, Ping Luo, Jiahuan Wang, Xiaoge Deng, Tao Sun, Dongsheng Li
Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) have achieved remarkable success in generation tasks by establishing a diffusion process that gradually perturbs real data into Gaussian noise and then learning a reverse process to reconstruct the data from noise. However, conventional denoising methods, such as Langevin dynamics and numerical stochastic differential equation solvers, rely on randomness but suffer from slow generation speeds due to the high number of score function evaluations. To address this, we propose a plug-and-play Markov adaptive momentum sampling method, inspired by the strong connection between the SGMs' sampling process and stochastic gradient descent optimization. Our approach accelerates the transformation process without introducing additional hyperparameters. Theoretically, we establish a rigorous foundation by analyzing the relationship between the distribution of samples generated by our method and the original data distribution. This provides a novel perspective on the analysis of sampling distributions. Empirically, our method demonstrates superior efficiency, generating high-quality images/graphs in significantly fewer sampling steps, achieving a speedup of 2x to 5x while maintaining or surpassing baseline performance on various image and graph generation benchmarks. These results underscore the effectiveness of adaptive momentum in enhancing the efficiency of SGMs.
Long-video question answering is challenging since the answer often hinges on a few decisive moments scattered throughout the video, while memory constraints force Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to sample frames at extremely low rates, resulting in sparsity that risks omitting key evidence. Though aggressively enlarging the context size is intuitive, we argue that performance remains fundamentally constrained by the bias, \emph{i.e.}, the misleading cues caused by spurious \textit{linguistic} correlations and salient yet irrelevant \textit{visual} observations. In this paper, we first introduce {S-MME}, a benchmark designed to systematically diagnose shortcut-biased behavior in MLLMs. To mitigate this failure, we further propose a training-free framework, Counterfactual Long-video Evidence-Aware Reasoning (CLEAR). By treating the full video-question pair as a complete view, CLEAR estimates bias effects via augmented views by only keeping the question or locally salient visual clips. Then, we intervene hidden states to mitigate the discrepancy at inference such that the correct answer can be predicted confidently. With experimental studies across five benchmarks, we show that our method is generalizable and can be integrated in different MLLMs, yielding consistent gains in prediction and robustness. We hope CLEAR can offer a complementary direction in test-time scaling for long-video understanding.
Ruotong Liao, Meikel Kokowski, Xiaoxiao Sun, Yongqin Xian, Laura Bravo Sánchez, Shiye Su, Federico Tombari, Serena Yeung-Levy 等 9 位作者
Today's multimodal assistants are typically prompted to interpret the visual evidence presented to them. To offload the cognitive burden of remembering across long horizons, wearable assistants should instead proactively acquire and maintain useful memory as the user's surroundings evolve. Doing so on the user's behalf requires identifying what matters, understanding the scene in real time, and initiating memory maintenance in the background while the user stays focused on their activities. We introduce ProactEgoMem, a benchmark that evaluates proactive memory in streaming egocentric video. Three tasks ground the evaluation in ambient environmental needs: Information Capture (IC) preserves transient yet dense visual information, State Tracking (ST) follows changing object states, and Location Tracking (LT) records object movements. The benchmark defines its protocol at two levels of proactiveness: the Notification Level asks for a single timely notification that satisfies the user's intent, while the deeper Intervention Level asks the agent to maintain memory on the user's behalf through an active start-to-stop tool lifecycle. Parallel ProactEgoMem-Daily and ProactEgoMem-Sci tracks contain 300/100 clips covering daily and scientific use cases, paired with 1000/500 questions in ProactEgoMem-QA, which measures the quality of the proactively acquired memory. Across proprietary, open-source, video-language, and streaming baselines, even the strongest models fail to capture memory both timely and accurately. ProactEgoMem provides a rigorous evaluation foundation for proactive multimodal assistance and for video agents that co-exist with their users.
Evaluating human-AI co-design requires testing whether coding agents can translate real users' multimodal requests into working application revisions. We introduce Co-Design Bench, a reference-free benchmark of 273 tasks curated from 37,463 deduplicated queries across 26,314 real user coding sessions. Its two tracks, Multimodal Editing (ME) and Repository Editing (RE), cover localized edits with optional image, audio, video, or document inputs and coordinated repository revisions. Tasks span three capability dimensions: Grounded Understanding, UI Transformation, and Functional Implementation. The tasks pair normalized requests and runnable pre-edit applications with 2,331 hidden expert-authored acceptance criteria. Our judge-then-refute protocol grades criteria using source and browser evidence, challenges positive verdicts with a separate LLM verifier, and audits visual and interaction claims without gold code or target screenshots. Under a shared agentic harness, the strongest of ten model endpoints passes an average of 69.9% of criteria per task but fully satisfies only 26.4% of tasks. All ten endpoints achieve lower criterion completion on repository edits spanning three or four change types than on those spanning one or two. Co-Design Bench provides a testbed for studying the gap between partial requirement satisfaction and complete task success under agentic execution for real-user application revisions.
In long-term interactions with large language model (LLM) agents, users reveal habits through their choices and actions. These habits capture implicit user information that agents must infer across conversations. However, individual observations may provide only partial evidence about a habit or when it applies. Retaining past interactions alone does not ensure that agents can infer habits and apply them appropriately. We introduce HABIT-Bench to evaluate how well agent memory systems infer habits from weak evidence and apply them to later requests. We construct synthetic user histories from task-oriented dialogue data and controlled habit graphs. The histories span hundreds of sessions across food, finance, software, and travel. Four-choice tasks assess agents' ability to infer user habits and apply them appropriately. They include temporary exceptions, changes in habits, and suggestions that users have not accepted. Sampled tasks undergo independent human review. We evaluate eight memory methods with Qwen3-235B-A22B and GLM-5.3-Flash. The best-performing memory method achieves 33.61\% macro accuracy across the four domains. Performance remains limited even when annotated evidence is supplied directly. These results expose a persistent gap between access to past interactions and the ability to infer and appropriately use user habits.
Zhen Lin Hefei University of Technology, Qiujie Xie Westlake University, Minjun Zhu, Shichen Li, QiYao Sun, Enhao Gu, Yiran Ding Westlake University, Ke Sun 等 13 位作者
High-quality scientific illustrations are essential for communicating complex scientific and technical concepts, yet existing automated systems remain limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. We present AutoFigure-Edit, an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. By combining long-context understanding, reference-guided styling, and native SVG editing, it enables efficient creation and refinement of high-quality scientific illustrations. To facilitate further progress in this field, we release the video at https://youtu.be/10IH8SyJjAQ, the full codebase at https://github.com/ResearAI/AutoFigure-Edit and provide a live demo for easy access and interactive use at https://autofigure.cc/.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated the growth of both human-authored and AI-generated research outputs, placing increasing strain on traditional academic publishing systems and challenging the scalability of conference- and journal-centered paradigms amid rising submission volumes, reviewer workload, and venue size. To address these challenges, we explore an AI-era publishing paradigm in which both human and AI scientists participate as authors and readers, and papers evolve through continuous, feedback-driven iteration. We propose AiraXiv, an AI-driven open-access platform built on open preprints, AI-augmented analysis and review, and reader feedback. AiraXiv supports human scientists through an interactive UI and AI scientists through Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based interactions. We validate AiraXiv through real-world deployments, including serving as the submission platform for ICAIS 2025, demonstrating its potential as a fast, inclusive, and scalable research infrastructure for the AI era. AiraXiv is publicly available at https://airaxiv.com.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Mingchao Liu, Yu Sun, Ruixiao Sun, Xin Dong, Xiang Shen, Hongwei Wang, Hongyu Xiong, Yang Song
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are effective at capturing the semantics of short video content; however, they often fail to attend to the policy-specific details required for reliable content moderation.To address this limitation, we introduce IPS, a novel framework that integrates In-prompt Process Supervision into MLLMs by introducing sequential reasoning over ancillary questions during fine-tuning. IPS consistently outperforms baseline MLLMs on public and proprietary benchmarks.Moreover, replacing human-annotated ancillary labels with MLLM-generated ones results in only marginal performance degradation, demonstrating robustness to noisy supervision and strong scalability with model-generated annotations.These findings establish IPS as a scalable and effective solution for complex multimodal classification in large-scale industrial settings.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Hao Sun, Yu Song Ritsumeikan University, Teng Shiyu, Ziwei Niu, Yen-wei Chen Ritsumeikan University
VLA models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for transferring semantic knowledge from web-scale data to physical robotic control. However, current single-frame architectures suffer from intrinsic limitations: temporal myopia that discards historical dynamics, reasoning gaps between high-level instructions and low-level motor commands, and inference inefficiency due to autoregressive scalar decoding. In this work, we propose MIRTH, a unified framework designed to address these challenges. MIRTH augments a pretrained VLA backbone with three key innovations: (1) dual-scale temporal memory hubs that compress long-term scene evolution and short-term motion trends into compact embeddings; (2) latent reasoning tokens optimized via a mutual-information objective carving out a semantic plan space to align multimodal context with action trajectories; and (3) a parallel action decoding scheme that replaces autoregressive generation with vector-wise prediction to maximize control throughput. Extensive evaluations on the LIBERO simulation benchmark and a real-world LeRobot platform demonstrate that MIRTH achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibiting emergent error recovery capabilities. We will release our code and collected datasets to facilitate reproducible research in embodied AI upon publication.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang Harbin Institute of Technology, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong Harbin Institute of Technology, Jinglong Gao Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval, Zhouhao Sun 等 11 位作者
Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is primarily confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. Extending GRPO to open-domain settings remains a critical challenge, as unconstrained generation entails multi-faceted and often conflicting objectives—such as creativity versus factuality—where rigid, static reward scalarization is inherently suboptimal. To address this, we propose MAESTRO (Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization), which introduces a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as a semantic bottleneck to perceive task-specific priorities. We formulate this as a contextual bandit problem within a bi-level optimization framework, where a lightweight Conductor network co-evolves with the policy by utilizing group-relative advantages as a meta-reward signal. Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines, while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO, and in some settings even reducing redundant generation.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Kevin Stowe Pindrop, Svetlana Afanaseva Pindrop Security Inc, Rodolfo C. Raimundo Pindrop Security Inc, Yitao Sun, Kailash Patil Pindrop
The meteoric rise in text generation capability has been accompanied by parallel growth in interest in machine-generated text detection: the capability to identify whether a given text was generated using a model or written by a person. While detection models show strong performance, they have the capacity to cause significant negative impacts. We explore potential biases in English machine-generated text detection systems. We curate a dataset of student essays and assess 16 different detection systems for bias across four attributes: gender, race/ethnicity, English-language learner (ELL) status, and economic status. We evaluate these attributes using regression-based models to determine the significance and power of the effects, as well as performing subgroup analysis. We find that while biases are generally inconsistent across systems, there are several key issues: several models tend to classify disadvantaged groups as machine-generated, ELL essays are more likely to be classified as machine-generated, economically disadvantaged students’ essays are less likely to be classified as machine-generated, and non-White ELL essays are disproportionately classified as machine-generated relative to their White counterparts. Finally, we perform human annotation and find that while humans perform generally poorly at the detection task, they show no significant biases on the studied attributes.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表