Fei Lin, Tengchao Zhang, Ziyang Gong, Xiaotong Yu, Bohan Zhang, Yifan Zhou, Qihao Yang, Ji Dai 等 18 位作者
Self-Driving Chemical Laboratories (SDCLs) are moving chemical experimentation toward embodied automation, where machines must perceive laboratory scenes, reason about experimental states, and act under physical, procedural, and safety constraints. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as embodied brains for such systems, existing laboratory benchmarks mainly focus on safety, anomaly detection, or general scientific understanding, leaving their execution-oriented embodied capabilities underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BEAKER, a Benchmark for evaluating Embodied Actionability, Knowledge, Experimentation, and Reasoning in SDCLs. BEAKER contains 1,000 expert-curated question-answer samples across 11 image and video task types, covering key judgments required for chemical laboratory execution, including affordance grounding, trajectory planning, equipment, state, and safety recognition, apparatus setup, operation and step reasoning, and temporal procedure reasoning. All questions and annotations are manually created and reviewed by chemistry and embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts, without AI-assisted generation or annotation. We evaluate 28 general-purpose, science-oriented, chemistry-specialized, and embodied MLLMs in an offline, single-turn setting. Results show that current models can follow coarse experimental procedures in videos, but still struggle to ground actions into operable regions and feasible trajectories, to recognize fine-grained laboratory apparatus, states, and safety norms, and to order steps in mid-length procedures. BEAKER thus reveals a clear gap between coarse procedural understanding and the precise, action-grounded perception required for laboratory execution, providing a diagnostic benchmark for future MLLMs in SDCLs.
Fei Lin, Tengchao Zhang, Ziyang Gong, Fei-Yue Wang
In recent years, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in high-stakes domains such as molecular science. However, challenges related to the verifiability and structural privacy of its outputs remain largely unresolved. This paper focuses on the task of molecular toxicity repair. It proposes a structure-private verification framework - ToxiEval-ZKP - which, for the first time, introduces zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) mechanisms into the evaluation process of this task. The system enables model developers to demonstrate to external verifiers that the generated molecules meet multidimensional toxicity repair criteria, without revealing the molecular structures themselves. To this end, we design a general-purpose circuit compatible with both classification and regression tasks, incorporating evaluation logic, Poseidon-based commitment hashing, and a nullifier-based replay prevention mechanism to build a complete end-to-end ZK verification system. Experimental results demonstrate that ToxiEval-ZKP facilitates adequate validation under complete structural invisibility, offering strong circuit efficiency, security, and adaptability, thereby opening up a novel paradigm for trustworthy evaluation in generative scientific tasks.
Toxicity remains a leading cause of early-stage drug development failure. Despite advances in molecular design and property prediction, the task of molecular toxicity repair, generating structurally valid molecular alternatives with reduced toxicity, has not yet been systematically defined or benchmarked. To fill this gap, we introduce ToxiMol, the first benchmark task for general-purpose Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) focused on molecular toxicity repair. We construct a standardized dataset covering 11 primary tasks and 660 representative toxic molecules spanning diverse mechanisms and granularities. We design a prompt annotation pipeline with mechanism-aware and task-adaptive capabilities, informed by expert toxicological knowledge. In parallel, we propose an automated evaluation framework, ToxiEval, which integrates toxicity endpoint prediction, synthetic accessibility, drug-likeness, and structural similarity into a high-throughput evaluation chain for repair success. We systematically assess 43 mainstream general-purpose MLLMs and conduct multiple ablation studies to analyze key issues, including evaluation metrics, candidate diversity, and failure attribution. Experimental results show that although current MLLMs still face significant challenges on this task, they begin to demonstrate promising capabilities in toxicity understanding, semantic constraint adherence, and structure-aware editing.
Looped Transformers increase effective depth by re-executing shared layers, but three limitations hinder their adoption: memory grows with the loop count, compute can only be adjusted in whole-block steps, and the loop count is hard to change after training. We propose LooM (Loop-invariant Memory), which addresses each in turn. In a causal encoder-decoder (CED), LooM loops only the decoder layers after the first, which read a global memory written once per token, and each of them publishes the key-value (KV) entry for a token only on its first visit, so the cache does not grow with the loop count. These layers loop independently, providing every budget from 3 to 21 layer executions per token, and one model trained on randomly sampled budgets covers all of them without a router. With enough loops, LooM outperforms a single-pass baseline trained on the same data on language modeling, zero-shot accuracy and long-context perplexity, while using the same cache size. Our analysis further shows that the training budget distribution decides what extra depth buys. These results suggest that a CED is a natural place to loop: memory is written once, and depth becomes a budget chosen at deployment.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based collaborative perception enables multiple agents to share complementary perceptual information, overcoming limitations such as occlusion and limited sensing range. Communication efficiency is a critical bottleneck, as UAVs operate under stringent bandwidth and computational constraints. However, existing spatial selection methods focus predominantly on foreground regions to reduce missed detections, neglecting perceptually ambiguous regions and leaving false detections unresolved. We propose UCP, an uncertainty-driven framework that characterizes collaborative value through observational uncertainty, identifying sensor-limited regions, and discriminative uncertainty, capturing model-level ambiguity near the decision boundary. These estimates drive spatial request and supply maps for efficient inter-agent communication, and the received messages are aggregated via U-Fusion, an uncertainty-guided cross-attention module. Experiments on three benchmarks across 3D object detection and trajectory prediction demonstrate a superior performance-bandwidth trade-off with high interpretability and strong generalizability.
Lingwei Dang, Yan Zhou, Juntong Li, Zhenhao Zhang, Yiteng Chen, Xiaoqiang Liu, Liang An, Hongwen Zhang 等 13 位作者
World-action models (WAMs) predict scene changes to guide robot actions, yet their RGB futures entangle state changes with appearance and lack 3D geometry. Recent WAMs add geometry as a training signal or a control interface, or build native 3D models, but decide what geometry to model rather than how the action should read it. Intuitively, control-relevant cues lie at embodiment--object interactions and their transitions, yet probing existing WAMs reveals that their action attention underweights these interactions in favor of the rest of the embodiment. To focus the action on these interactions, we present Gnomon4D, a WAM that jointly generates future video, robot actions, and GeoDelta, a video-aligned 4D geometric motion field recording the image-plane displacement and depth change of embodiment and object points. With the embodiment and objects in one field, their relative motion, which marks an interaction, can be read off. Guided by this motion and the task, Interaction-Salient Attention (InSAttn) selects where the action reads, and Transition-Anchored Aggregation (TransAgg) selects when, around grasp and release. As GeoDelta encodes surface motion rather than embodiment-specific controls, it serves as a human--robot quasi-action that links action-free pretraining on EgoManip-5000H, which we curate, to robot mid-training on Robot-30H. Gnomon4D leads on RoboTwin~2.0, VLABench, and RoboDojo, and outperforms real-robot baselines, especially under visual shifts. Project page: https://droliven.github.io/Gnomon4D.
Coding agents are increasingly used in real-world workflows across diverse domains, motivating evaluation grounded in real user tasks. Existing benchmarks, however, largely rely on static public tasks with reference patches or hidden tests. Next-generation coding-agent benchmarks should therefore move beyond correctness on fixed tasks toward continually renewed evaluation of overall artifact quality in real user workflows. We propose Trace2Eval, a dynamically updatable pipeline that constructs benchmarks from real-world interaction trajectories. Trace2Eval employs a multi-agent reconstruction system to analyze the filtered trajectory, recover the original user query, restore the workspace files to their pre-interaction state, and rebuild a trajectory-equivalent execution environment. A candidate agent then executes the reconstructed query to produce an initial artifact. To evaluate these artifacts, the pipeline iteratively refines human rubrics through inter-annotator alignment, and calibrates judge agents against human assessments using source-code and runtime evidence. Guided by feedback from the Trace2Eval pipeline, models revise their initial artifacts, yielding a mean score gain of 10.05 percentage points across 19 model-harness configurations and a maximum of 19.28 percentage points for DeepSeek-V4-Pro with Claude Code, which supports rubric feedback as actionable guidance for artifact improvement.
As LLM-based agents develop, they have been increasingly applied in the legal domain. Legal Judgment Prediction~(LJP) requires models to conduct multi-step reasoning and external legal evidence retrieval. Existing legal search agents' performance is often constrained by the quality of retrieval queries. They often formulate queries directly from the initial user request, overlooking latent legal issues and legally salient details. To address this issue, we propose \emph{LegalEvolver}, a query optimization framework specifically designed to generate legally informative queries for LJP-oriented retrieval. Sampling high-quality optimized queries and their corresponding search trajectories is challenging, as relying solely on unguided high-temperature rollouts is both inefficient and constrained by the model's initial capabilities. We therefore heuristically optimize queries as seeds, improving the efficiency of trajectory generation. Furthermore, we summarize rollout experience into rubrics and use them to guide multi-round iterative self-evolution. Iteratively performing rubric optimization and rubric-guided RL enables the model to surpass its initial performance ceiling. End-to-end performance on extensive benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of query optimization on LJP. Comparisons with direct SFT followed by RL demonstrate the effectiveness of rubric guidance. Evolving rubrics further outperform fixed rubrics, confirming the benefits of self-evolution.
Pengfei Qu, Lei Ye, Wenyu Ouyang, Chi Zhang, Yikai Chai, Shuolong Xu, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang 等 9 位作者
Accurate prediction in ungauged basins (PUB) requires effective transfer across hydrologically diverse regions. While deep learning has advanced large-sample hydrological modeling, its cross-regional generalization depends in part on the static basin descriptors used to guide model behavior. Earth Foundation Models (EFMs) provide a promising alternative by learning environmental representations from multi-modal satellite data. In this study, we evaluate the 64-dimensional AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) embeddings as a new form of static basin representation and assess their value for streamflow prediction under both in-sample (IS) and out-of-sample (OOS) settings using the CAMELS dataset. Results show that AEF embeddings offer higher OOS robustness than CAMELS attributes, despite nearly identical IS performance. Mutual-information analysis reveals statistical associations between AEF embeddings and conventional catchment attributes related to terrain, vegetation, and rooting characteristics. We further investigate similarity-based donor-basin selection for PUB using CAMELS attributes and AEF embeddings. Across 100 target basins, AEF static inputs generally improved PUB performance. With AEF inputs, similarity-based donor selection outperformed random selection for smaller donor pools, but its advantage diminished as pool size increased. Adding more donor basins did not consistently improve performance. Leave-one-cluster-out experiments showed AEF input benefits depended on basin partitioning, suggesting that transferability remains sensitive to the catchment conditions represented during training. Overall, this study demonstrates that Earth Foundation Model embeddings provide a transferable representation for PUB prediction and underscores the importance of basin representation quality and donor pool design, motivating future research toward unified hydrological foundation models.
Zhuang Zhao, Jiongchi Yu, Yao Zhang, Dongge Liu, Qiang Hu, Xiaohong Li, Yang Liu
Continuous fuzzing platforms such as OSS-Fuzz provide sustained security testing for open-source projects, but long-term build breakages reduce security coverage and waste infrastructure resources. In OSS-Fuzz, around 20% of integrated projects remain in build-failure states, leaving their fuzzers off duty. These failures expose a maintenance gap between platform maintainers, who lack project-specific context, and project maintainers, who often lack fuzzing and infrastructure expertise. Existing program-repair techniques cannot be directly applied because fuzz build breakages span evolving project and infrastructure artifacts and require repeated infrastructure-aware diagnosis. We present FuzzMedic, an automated agent for fuzz build repair. FuzzMedic performs evidence-guided diagnosis across project and fuzzing-infrastructure artifacts. It explores repairs over a repair-state graph (RSG) that records the evolving workspace and build feedback. Branching and rollback enable FuzzMedic to recover from unproductive repair paths during long-horizon debugging. Candidate patches are validated to restore executable fuzz targets rather than merely suppress build failures. We evaluate FuzzMedic on 128 reproducible OSS-Fuzz build failures extracted from 1,820 real-world failures. FuzzMedic achieves a 48.44% repair rate and outperforms three representative program-repair baselines. In real-world use, it produces 29 patches merged into upstream or OSS-Fuzz main branches, including repairs for three failures that had remained unresolved for more than one year and two cases that had never built successfully.
Shaopeng Liang, Biao Zhang, Hongzhen Ye, Zeyang Hou, Ma Jiang, Jintao Tu, yunxi. hz, Zhijia Fang 等 11 位作者
Generative retrieval predicts semantic identifiers for candidate entities. In local retail and food delivery, candidates must also be serviceable for a particular user at a particular time. Location, weather, and traffic reshape merchant and product supply, so a catalog-valid identifier may be infeasible for the current request. Post-generation filtering removes such candidates only after beam capacity and inference computation have been spent. We study retrieval over an explicitly materialized, request-time supply snapshot, where short output sequences leave little opportunity to amortize online constraint preparation. Our RTP-LLM pipeline compiles eligible residual-quantization identifiers into a compressed sparse row prefix index, overlaps CPU compilation with model prefill, and shares the uploaded index across beams. Legal expansions retain original-model log probabilities, and constraint states follow selected beam parents. We formalize snapshot-relative identifier validity and distinguish it from entity-level eligibility and freshness. The implementation generates three-token merchant identifiers. Historical evidence covers daily catalog constraints and subsequent request-scoped serving evaluations. In one matched-beam daily-constraint case, filtered merchants decrease from 170 of 299 candidates to 29 of 299; residual distance filtering motivates request-specific constraints. A different-host comparison with 30,000 supplied entries reports a 0.6 ms service-side latency increment, while client measurements expose additional request costs. Captured requests from three geographic settings characterize behavior across supply sizes and output widths. These observations span development stages and measurement boundaries. They establish a practical implementation and identify bottlenecks, but do not establish compute savings at matched retrieval quality.
Hantao Zhang, Sidra Gibeault, Matthew W. Daniels, Philippe Talatchian, Ursula Ebels, Advait Madhavan, Mark D. Stiles
Stochastic Ising networks are widely used to describe collective dynamics in complex systems and to compute, yet physical implementations of these networks often contain both asymmetric interactions and nonzero signal propagation times that fall outside conventional theories of their behavior. Here, we study stochastic Ising networks with asymmetric and time-delayed interactions motivated by experimental observations in coupled superparamagnetic tunnel junctions. Time delay fundamentally reshapes the dynamics induced by antisymmetric couplings, producing strong oscillatory temporal correlations consistent with experiment. Sufficiently long delays strongly suppress the non-uniformity of steady-state probability distributions, a behavior explained by an exponential suppression of the first-order equal-time cross-correlation between pairs of spins. Residual non-uniformity is due to the equal-time cross-correlation mediated by a third spin that contributes only at higher order in the coupling strength. These relatively featureless probability distributions coexist with pronounced delayed temporal correlations, distinguishing them from equilibrium high-temperature behavior. We further show analytically that these delay-induced near-uniform distributions emerge in a broad class of stochastic networks that lack symmetry-breaking bias fields. Introducing symmetry-breaking bias fields restores a strong dependence of the steady state on interactions with qualitatively modified behavior. Simulations of networks with five coupled spins demonstrate that these effects persist beyond minimal systems with only two spins.
Gregor Baer, Chao Zhang, Isel Grau, Pieter Van Gorp
Explainable AI (XAI) methods are commonly evaluated using functional correctness metrics, also called faithfulness or fidelity, which estimate how closely an explanation reflects the model's reasoning. Higher correctness is assumed to produce better human understanding, but this link has not been tested with controlled levels. We conducted a user study (N=200) that manipulated explanation correctness at four levels (100%, 85%, 70%, 55%) in a synthetic time series classification task where participants could not rely on domain knowledge or visual intuition. Explanations were constructed to resemble feature attributions, with correctness defined against a known ground truth rather than estimated from a trained model. Participants predicted a simulated AI's decisions from these explanations (forward simulation), and we used their forward simulation accuracy as a proxy for understanding. Correctness affected forward simulation accuracy, but not at every level: accuracy dropped at 70% and 55% relative to 100%, with no further reduction below 70% and no conclusive difference between 85% and 100%. Lower correctness reduced how many participants predicted accurately rather than lowering accuracy uniformly, and even with fully correct explanations, only a subset of participants predicted well above chance. In exploratory analyses, some participants predicted decisions accurately but described the wrong pattern when asked what the AI used, and self-reported ratings correlated with forward simulation accuracy only when explanations were fully correct. These findings suggest that, for feature-attribution-style explanations, not all differences in functional correctness translate to differences in human understanding, highlighting the need to validate functional metrics against human outcomes.
Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) can reconstruct fine-scale Earth-observation fields from coarse observations, but reconstruction accuracy alone does not provide a calibrated rule for identifying reliable spatial regions. Conformal Mask Calibration (CMC), built on conformal risk control, converts a spatial uncertainty score into a trust mask and controls the expected worst-case local distortion under exchangeability. However, its fixed threshold can become miscalibrated in Earth-observation streams affected by seasonality and episodic events. We propose $\textit{CARM}$ (Conformal Adaptive Risk Masking), a statistical framework for adaptive spatial risk control under temporal distribution shift. CARM maintains experts with heterogeneous update rates and aggregates their threshold proposals online using an asymmetric surrogate loss, balancing rapid adaptation to distribution changes against stability during relatively stationary periods. All updates are causal and use only mature feedback available after a fixed delay, allowing CARM to operate with any SR model that provides a spatial uncertainty score. We prove that the time-averaged mask-conditioned risk converges to at most $α$ at an $O(1/T)$ rate, without distributional assumptions and for any choice of aggregation weights across experts. On a daily South China Sea chlorophyll-$\textit{a}$ SR stream, CARM reduces the empirical violation rate from $43.49\%$ to $9.38\%$ and the moving-average exceedance frequency from $47.29\%$ to $1.22\%$ at $α=0.10$, while retaining a non-trivial trusted region. Experiments on ERA5 wind and OSTIA sea-surface temperature further show consistent relative improvements across multiple SR backbones.
Omni models answer questions about videos by jointly processing sampled frames and audio in one turn, with progress driven largely by scaling model size and omni training data. We ask whether a model needs to hear the audio directly at all, and present SleuthVLM, an agent harness built on a VLM that never hears the audio directly: speech will be transcribed into text, and the VLM will sleuth the video on its own without any predefined workflow. On four omni benchmarks with videos up to 90 minutes, SleuthVLM achieves the best average accuracy: \textbf{75.0%}, 2.6 points above Gemini 3.8 Flash, and it also tops the Video-MME-v2 leaderboard with \textbf{77.8%}; with an open-source 27B VLM, it beats all open-source omni models. We draw three findings: SleuthVLM beats a model that glances; hearing is not the bottleneck, agentic ability is; omni understanding needs better agentic ability, not just more omni data for modality alignment. So we provide a simple but effective starting point for doing omni video understanding. Omni understanding needs better agents, not just bigger models that hear.
Hanqing Wang, Zhaotian Cai, Ruichuan An, Bohan Zeng, Tao Zhang, Yilin Chen, Xu Jiang, Kaiquan Chen 等 16 位作者
Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models generate robot actions from visual observations and language instructions, but their understanding of physical dynamics remains limited. Video world models can capture scene dynamics, yet generating future videos introduces high latency into the control loop. We introduce PDRVLA, whose lightweight Physical Dynamics Module extracts physical tokens from vision--language features to condition action generation without online video generation. The module learns through direct prediction of future RGB, depth, and optical-flow features, with auxiliary supervision through a frozen pretrained video world model. Training relies entirely on publicly available data, expanded through human-to-robot synthesis, subtask annotation, and embodied chain-of-thought (ECoT) annotation. Across four simulation benchmarks, PDRVLA achieves success rates of 99.3% on LIBERO, 89.9% on LIBERO-Plus, 93.6% on RoboTwin~2.0, and 81.5% on SimplerEnv. Ablations show improved future prediction with world-model supervision and evaluate how subtask conditioning, future object-pose supervision, and ECoT training affect action success.
Hao Zhang, Ismail Rasim Ulgen, Bismarck Bamfo Odoom, Rui Liu, Zihan Zhang, Berrak Sisman, Philipp Koehn
Expressiveness is central to speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), yet existing datasets rarely align source and target speech jointly in content, prosody, timing, and speaker identity. Consequently, current systems often rely on indirect conditioning or transfer mechanisms. To obtain this supervision, we introduce a training-data construction strategy that combines professional dubbing, which provides human-performed correspondence in content, prosody, and timing, with multilingual voice conversion to reduce speaker mismatch. We evaluate this supervision using existing expressive S2ST systems and DirectS2ST, an end-to-end method developed in this work that predicts the complete target-speech representation directly from source speech. Experiments on English-German and English-Spanish show that holistic parallel supervision improves expressive realization across all evaluated systems. DirectS2ST exhibits the largest gains in content, prosody, timing, speaker similarity, and human-rated expressiveness. To our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic investigation of holistic parallel supervision for expressive S2ST.
We resolve longstanding questions about connectivity, reconstruction,and looseness in random $k$-SAT, for sufficiently large fixed $k$ as the number $n$ of variables tends to infinity. $\textbf{Single-variable connectivity up to reconstruction.}$ At clause densities up to \[\frac{2^k}{k}\bigl(\ln k+\ln\ln k+γ_*-o_k(1)\bigr),\] a polynomial-time algorithm joins a typical pair of satisfying assignments with high probability, using $O_k(n)$ single-variable flips that preserve satisfiability. Here $γ_*\approx0.871$ arises from a refined tree-reconstruction analysis. $\textbf{Settling the reconstruction threshold.}$ Building on the tools developed for connectivity, we determine the clustering threshold defined by the reconstruction criterion to be \[\frac{2^k}{k}\bigl(\ln k+\ln\ln k+γ_*+o_k(1)\bigr),\] below the classical cavity prediction with constant term $1+O(\ln\ln k/\ln k)$. $\textbf{Shattering before rigidity.}$ We locate the looseness--rigidity transition at a higher density, matching the classical cavity prediction for clustering: \[\frac{2^k}{k} \left(\ln k+\ln\ln k+1+Θ\left(\frac{\ln\ln k}{\ln k}\right)\right).\] Below the transition, we establish a stronger form of looseness: any variable of a typical solution can be reversed by logarithmically many single-variable flips that preserve satisfiability. Above it, reversing most variables of a typical solution requires changing linearly many variables (rigidity). Yet throughout an interval between reconstruction and rigidity, the solution space already splits into groups of exponentially small relative size separated by linear Hamming distance and linear energy barriers (shattering), while logarithmic looseness persists.
Geng Zhang, Fangzhao Zhang, Cong Xie, Tiantian Fan, Yang You
Diffusion drafters accelerate speculative decoding by denoising multiple draft tokens in parallel. Their training uses anchor sampling to construct compact draft queries and performs cross-attention with a block-sparse mask over a much longer context. We empirically show that acceptance length remains stable as context scales with a fixed query budget, while increasing the query budget yields diminishing quality gains, jointly establishing a practical regime with queries far shorter than the context. No existing context parallelism (CP) method jointly exploits this query--context asymmetry and meets the nonlinear, sample-dependent load-balancing requirement created by anchor sampling. We present Split-KV, an exact CP method that keeps key/value shards local and limits per-layer attention communication to query-sized tensors, making this communication independent of context length. Its global query view further enables a cost-aware longest-processing-time-first (LPT) strategy that balances context key/value chunks by their realized attention cost. At a CP size of 64, Split-KV retains 85--91\% weak-scaling efficiency and achieves up to $3.67\times$ speedup over the fastest available CP baseline. LPT achieves $<$1\% imbalance and plans three orders of magnitude faster than the best load-balancing baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/zxgx/verl.
Forecasting emotion in conversation is increasingly framed as predicting the next emotional state's value. We show this targets a hard quantity in a state-observed testbed and propose a learnable, deployable reformulation instead. On valence-arousal-dominance trajectories from a dyadic corpus, repeating a speaker's own previous state sets a persistence baseline that no frozen-encoder correction meaningfully improves upon and a state-space filter exceeds; the floor requires the historical state to be observed, since an estimated anchor collapses persistence below a direct forecaster. What survives is the timing of a departure from persistence, learnable on three of four corpora and near chance on the highest-base-rate corpus, a negative result we report. We recast the task as selective departure forecasting: a lead-time-weighted metric with a leakage protocol, and commitment policies whose best choice switches with the departure rate. A dialogue-level conformal risk control bounds the expected loss of committed predictions, meeting the target in all twelve configurations tested, though the guarantee is bought through abstention, with coverage and alarm recall falling sharply on the hardest corpus. One tested language model's confidence fails as a ranking signal where another succeeds, a model-dependent failure not yet attributable to family versus scale. Code and result logs are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Comparisons in conversational emotion-shift forecasting are easily distorted when a learned model receives rich features but its transition baseline is given a noisy or unavailable current-emotion label, when hyperparameter budgets differ, or when target-turn information enters the representation. We present an information-matched, leakage-safe auditing protocol that closes these gaps with an explicit commitment point, executable causality tests, equal four-configuration validation searches, and seed-dialogue-aware inference. Applying it to six causal model families on four text corpora and two feature-source sensitivity configurations shows that a deployable train-only current-emotion classifier feeding the transition baseline yields a different verdict than an oracle diagnostic where both sides receive gold current emotion. Under the deployable condition, learned models improve over the predicted-label baseline on all four primary corpora; DailyDialog gains are large and survive a 72-comparison Holm correction (best ROC-AUC gain = +0.167, adjusted p=.0144). Under matched gold information, the baseline remains competitive on IEMOCAP and stronger on MELD, while every model retains a large DailyDialog advantage. We additionally report precision-recall AUC, calibration, a strictly utterance-local feature control, same-person self-shift forecasting, and a future-access dose-response test. An eight-item leakage checklist accompanies the protocol. Code, raw seed predictions, and reporting artifacts are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Shu Zhou, Ziyang He, Yuxin Rao, Yudong Fang, Jiali Qian, Dongyuan Chen, Juntao Zhang, Yong Hu
Financial agents are becoming an important class of real-world AI systems. Financial tasks vary widely in type and difficulty, and many are open-ended with no ground-truth answers. However, existing benchmarks neither capture this breadth and open-endedness nor separate grounding from correctness. To bridge this gap, we introduce $\textbf{AgenticFinBench}$, a benchmark of 230 real-world financial tasks spanning 8 categories, 2 languages, and 4 complexity levels. We also propose a reference-free evaluation framework that combines question-specific rubrics with a two-stage claim audit that detects hallucinations, defined as claims absent from the agent's trace and refuted by external evidence. This framework better matches how financial work is assessed in practice. Experiments across 18 agent configurations reveal three key findings: (1) Ignoring hallucinations can overstate agent performance: hallucination auditing lowers the baseline leader's score by 7.58 points and moves it to fourth place. (2) Harness differences explain more variation in evidence grounding than model differences (28.6% vs 8.8%). (3) Quality scores fall from 89.44 on direct retrieval to 79.18 on the most complex tasks. Case studies show that agents struggle to explain how events affect company profits or stock prices, compare financial data on a consistent basis, and justify their conclusions. By releasing AgenticFinBench, we aim to advance financial reasoning, factual verification, and agent design for more reliable responses to diverse real-world financial requests.
Domain-specific knowledge graphs (DKGs) are critical yet often suffer from limited coverage compared to General Knowledge Graphs (GKGs). Existing tasks to enrich DKGs rely primarily on extracting knowledge from external unstructured data or completing KGs through internal reasoning, but the scope and quality of such integration remain limited. This highlights a critical gap: little systematic exploration has been conducted on how comprehensive, high-quality GKGs can be effectively leveraged to supplement DKGs. To address this gap, we propose a new and practical task: domain-specific knowledge graph fusion (DKGF), which aims to mine and integrate relevant facts from general knowledge graphs into domain-specific knowledge graphs to enhance their completeness and utility. Unlike previous research, this new task faces two key challenges: (1) high ambiguity of domain relevance, i.e., difficulty in determining whether knowledge from a GKG is truly relevant to the target domain , and (2) cross-domain knowledge granularity misalignment, i.e., GKG facts are typically abstract and coarse-grained, whereas DKGs frequently require more contextualized, fine-grained representations aligned with particular domain scenarios. To address these, we present ExeFuse, a neuro-symbolic framework based on a novel Fact-as-Program paradigm. ExeFuse treats fusion as an executable process, utilizing neuro-symbolic execution to infer logical relevance beyond surface similarity and employing target space grounding to calibrate granularity. We construct new datasets to establish the first standardized evaluation suite for this task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ExeFuse effectively overcomes domain barriers to achieve superior fusion performance.
Soil hydraulic functions underpin water flow and transport modeling in the vadose zone, yet they are commonly represented by expert-designed formulations such as the Mualem-van Genuchten (MvG) model. Because these formulations rest on predefined functional assumptions, balancing predictive accuracy and parametric compactness across soil textures remains challenging. Here we introduce a graph-based equation discovery framework that distills soil hydraulic functions from experimental data. Reapplied to the original datasets that motivated the MvG parameterization, the framework recovers a concise water retention function together with an analytical unsaturated hydraulic conductivity expression whose mathematical structure departs from classical empirical forms. Evaluated across soils of contrasting texture, the discovered model predicts unsaturated hydraulic conductivity more accurately than MvG and its common variants, while its fitted parameters retain interpretable correlations with measurable soil physical properties. These findings suggest that data-driven discovery can yield compact, analytically tractable constitutive relations that move beyond fixed empirical formulations.
Coding agents must deliver correct software while respecting users' expertise, preferences, and working conditions. Existing benchmarks increasingly incorporate interaction, yet personalized requirement fulfillment remains underexplored. We introduce PersonaCodeBench, which turns user characteristics into verifiable obligations in persona-driven multi-turn coding sessions. Our persona pool spans roles, technical abilities, interaction preferences, and practical constraints, yielding task-grounded evolved requirements for implementation, permissions, testing, explanation, and delivery. At runtime, a controller governs user simulator responses and requirement disclosure, using online requirement evaluation to provide feedback and advance the interaction. Requirements emerge progressively, with their content, disclosure conditions, and acceptance criteria fixed before evaluation. A completion verifier and a personalization verifier separately assess native correctness and persona fulfillment. Joint pass requires both adherence to the declared budget and compliance with validity conditions. We evaluate all major frontier agents, establish a comprehensive leaderboard, and conduct detailed experimental analyses to validate effectiveness. PersonaCodeBench supports reproducible evaluation of coding agents' ability to meet explicit, personalized user expectations alongside coding objectives.
Diagnosis by Composition: Detecting and Localizing Unseen Diseases by Composing Learned Radiological Findings
Kaihua Hou, Wei Liu, Yi Huang, Hao Zhang, Haibo Jin, Yifei Sun, Yuan gao, Zuoou Li 等 13 位作者
AI 速览：提出诊断即组合（DbC）框架，通过学习放射学征象词汇并依据指南组合征象图来诊断和定位未见疾病，在肝脏CT上优于对比方法。
Deep models for radiological diagnosis are typically trained to predict disease labels directly from images, which limits them to diseases seen during training and makes their decisions hard to interpret in radiologists' terms. Radiology, however, proceeds from visual findings to disease through published guidelines that make this decision rule explicit, interpretable, and reproducible. We introduce diagnosis by composition (DbC), a representation learning framework that encodes this findings-first logic. DbC learns a vocabulary of radiological findings by aligning image features with the text embeddings of the findings, each finding represented as a dense map over the scan. A disease is defined by a set of required findings derived from its guidelines, and its diagnosis map is a fixed, parameter-free composition of the corresponding finding maps. Because the finding-to-disease mapping is derived from guidelines rather than learned, DbC is interpretable and auditable by design, can extend to new diseases by specifying their findings without retraining, and can diagnose unseen diseases by composing their findings. On multi-phase liver CT, DbC detects and localizes unseen diseases, rare diseases from a different institution, and an external cohort significantly better than all comparators, including models that align images with disease names. DbC also improves detection and localization in the fully supervised setting and remains superior across training-set sizes. Although demonstrated on liver CT, DbC applies wherever radiological guidelines define diseases through findings.
The Nisan-Ronen conjecture, a central problem in algorithmic game theory, asserts that no deterministic truthful mechanism for makespan minimization on $m$ unrelated machines can achieve an approximation ratio better than $m$. Christodoulou, Koutsoupias, and Kovács resolved it in 2023, but the optimal approximation ratio achievable by randomized truthful mechanisms remained open. Recently, Anastasiadis, Christodoulou, Koutsoupias, Kovács, and Schecker extended techniques from the deterministic proof to establish a $(3/2-\sqrt{2})(m-1)$ lower bound for universally truthful mechanisms with discrete support and gave a universally truthful mechanism with approximation ratio $m/2+o(m)$. For the broader class of truthful-in-expectation (TIE) mechanisms, however, the gap remained large: the best known upper bound was $(m+5)/2$, while the lower bound was only $2-1/m$. We prove a lower bound of $(m+1)/2$, determining the optimal TIE approximation ratio up to an additive constant as $m/2+Θ(1)$. Our result also improves the leading constant in the lower bound for universally truthful mechanisms from $3/2-\sqrt{2} \approx 0.0858$ to $1/2$. Together with their $m/2+o(m)$ upper bound, our result determines the optimal approximation ratio for universally truthful mechanisms up to lower-order terms.
Dexterous manipulation involves not only moving objects, but also arranging the hand around them to maintain useful contacts and enable subsequent actions. Yet many learning-based systems specify goals primarily through object poses or trajectories, leaving hand-object configurations to emerge implicitly. We introduce DexHOT, which formulates dexterous manipulation as hand-object configuration transfer: moving between feasible configurations that jointly specify hand articulation and object pose relative to the wrist. DexHOT learns a reusable relation-conditioned transfer primitive from synthetic feasible configuration pairs, without human reference motions, and composes long-horizon behaviors through closed-loop tracking of configuration subgoals. On DexHOTBench with 120 objects, a single policy achieves 80.5% transfer success on seen objects and 69.4% on unseen objects; on a real dexterous hand, it achieves 61.5% success over 200 real-robot transfers and 90% task success across six demonstration-guided tasks. These results show that explicit hand-object goals provide an expressive and composable interface for dexterous manipulation. More details and videos are available at https://dex-hot.github.io/.
Andrey Ignatov, Georgy Perevozchikov, Radu Timofte, Yuhong He, Yuxuan Qiu, Tianyu Hao, Ruoqi Li, Yueqi Yang 等 22 位作者
With the increasing importance of mobile camera quality in modern smartphones, growing attention has been directed toward computational photography and advanced image signal processing (ISP) algorithms aimed at enhancing various perceptual attributes of captured images. This creates a need for efficient deep learning models for this problem that are not only performant but can also be deployed on constrained mobile hardware. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design fast solutions that can reconstruct RGB photos from RAW Bayer camera data while running on popular smartphone GPUs from Qualcomm and Arm. For this, the participants were provided with a large-scale Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of RAW-RGB image pairs captured with the Sony IMX586 Quad Bayer mobile sensor and a professional 102MP medium format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Dimensity 9500 chipsets with the Adreno and Mali GPUs, respectively. Top solutions proposed in this challenge are able to reconstruct high-quality 5MP RGB image from raw data on both platforms under 100 milliseconds. A comprehensive description of the models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.
Multimodal agents use web and image tools to answer questions beyond their internal knowledge. Some search tasks use images mainly to identify an initial entity, then rely on text retrieval. These tasks offer limited insight into how agents connect information across images, objects, and search steps. We therefore focus on visual context management. This involves organizing and using visual information and linking it to other findings during search. Visually intensive tasks require agents to combine object appearance, local details, or spatial relations with external information. We introduce VisSearch-Bench, with 204 human-written tasks across 7 main domains and 25 subdomains. It covers Set-wise Visual Search, Sequential Visual Search, Hybrid Wide-Deep Search, Competitive Visual Disambiguation, and Visual-Structure-Guided Search. Each task provides a reference answer, traceable evidence, and scoring rules. Accuracy measures complete task success, while Process Score measures the correctness and completeness of individual results and subquestion answers. Across 16 multimodal models, the best system fully solves only 26.47% of tasks, even with search tools. These results highlight the challenge of linking visual evidence with search results to produce complete answers.