Zuhao Yang, Kaichen Zhang, Sudong Wang, Keming Wu, Zhongyu Yang, Bo Li, Xiaojuan Qi, Shijian Lu 等 10 位作者
Training large multimodal models (LMMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) to natively invoke video-processing tools (e.g., cropping) has become a promising route to long-video understanding. However, most existing agentic Video-LMMs dispatch tool calls sequentially (i.e., one per turn). Sequential tool calling can propagate localization errors, accumulate irrelevant context, and require an additional main-model generation for each successive crop. We introduce ParaVT, a multi-agent RL framework for Parallel Video Tool calling, dispatching multiple time-window crops in a single turn, allowing evidence from multiple temporal windows to be examined concurrently. Yet applying standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to ParaVT reveals an obstacle we term the Tool Prior Paradox: inherited tool-use priors appear to support exploration while competing with the output format learned during supervised fine-tuning. Standard RL can also settle on tool skipping. A comparison with a model with weaker tool-use priors shows stable formatting but no tool calls during RL, consistent with a trade-off between format stability and tool exploration. We propose PARA-GRPO (Parseability-Anchored and Ratio-gAted GRPO), which augments standard RL with two complementary mechanisms: (i) a format reward that encourages tag closure and penalizes unclosed reasoning blocks, and (ii) a per-prompt randomization of the overview-frame budget to create a reward advantage for tool use when the overview provides insufficient evidence. Across six long-video understanding benchmarks, ParaVT improves over the Qwen3-VL baseline by +7.9% on average, with PARA-GRPO raising training-time format reward from 0.13 to a peak of 0.64. These findings highlight the need to account for inherited tool-use priors when designing RL methods for long-video understanding.
Large language models (LLMs) compress text far better than classical compressors, but LLM-based compressors are slow, particularly during decompression. We argue that their decoding time has two fundamentally different sources. Execution redundancy, such as per-token host transfers, CPU-side coding, and token-by-token encoding, is work that the coded output does not require and can be removed without changing a single output bit. Sequential dependency, one model call per decoded token, is inherent to lossless decoding and cannot be removed by better execution, only traded for more calls or for more bits. We remove execution redundancy with a GPU-resident pipeline whose block-parallel encoding is made lossless in half precision by batch-invariant kernels, speeding up arithmetic coding by up to 5.8x in encoding and 3.0x in decoding without changing its compression rate. We then study the two ways of trading sequential dependency, speculative dual-model coding (SDMC) and multi-token single-model coding (MSMC), characterize the compression cost of predicting several tokens from a shared prefix, and identify the workloads in which fewer model calls are worth that cost.
Action-chunking robot policies predict sequences of future actions, but deployment requires choosing how many actions to execute before replanning. The execution horizon trades off feedback frequency against motion continuity. However, success varies non-monotonically with the execution horizon, and the best-performing horizon differs across tasks. These effects make a single fixed horizon unreliable as a default execution strategy across tasks. We propose PACE (Phase-Aware Chunk Execution), a training-free method that selects execution horizons online from predicted action chunks. PACE uses prominent low-speed valleys in the predicted speed profile as candidate replanning boundaries, exploiting the phase-dependent kinematics of manipulation trajectories. By default, PACE calibrates the valley threshold from each task's existing training demonstrations, without task-specific fixed-horizon tuning. On the 50-task RoboTwin2.0 benchmark, PACE improves average success from 57.8% to 64.2% over the strongest fixed-horizon baseline and outperforms the adaptive execution baselines AAC and AutoHorizon. With GR00T N1.7 on LIBERO, PACE achieves the highest overall success rate among the evaluated strategies, supporting its applicability across base policies, benchmarks, and action representations. On real robots, PACE improves the average task score from 60.7 to 77.7 and success rate from 50.7% to 70.4% over full-chunk execution. Code is available at https://niejunnan25.github.io/pace-project/.
Existing metalinguistic reasoning benchmarks require both inference of rules and their application, making failures hard to diagnose. We introduce typological feature induction (TFI) which targets the former step. Given sentences in an unnamed language paired with translations in a known pivot language, models must predict a typological feature of the unnamed language. From Grambank and multi-parallel corpora, we automatically build evaluation questions over 195 languages. We find that LLMs identify 59--80% of these languages from only 16 sentence pairs; and misaligning the translations barely affects their accuracy, suggesting reliance on prior knowledge of the language. Enciphering text to prevent recognition increases the corpus' utility, but mainly for features where target and pivot languages agree. On languages which models cannot identify, neither open model outperforms a majority-value baseline. Since induction from raw text aligns with field linguists' use-case, this work indicates the models tested are not yet ready for this role. TFI offers a scalable path to track progress in this direction.
Temporal-difference (TD) learning trains neural representations using bootstrapped targets generated by evolving value estimates, yet how predictive features emerge and propagate under incomplete neural updates remains poorly understood. We investigate this problem using finite-width two-layer ReLU critics on a constructed family of smooth stochastic horizon-$H$ MDPs with unknown quadratic structure and $d$-dimensional observations. We first show that an informative TD update acquires the quadratic Bellman signal and yields a representation admitting a bounded predictive readout. The simultaneous hidden-weight and head update achieves a strict finite-sample prediction-risk improvement over matched head-only SGD, with a $2(d+1)$-fold larger population quadratic response. We then establish that an imperfect learned continuation can already provide informative supervision to an earlier zero-reward stage. By tracking coupled neural updates with one SGD step per target copy, without requiring intermediate Bellman regressions to be solved, we obtain a uniform prediction-error transient $\exp[-Ω(K/(Hd))]$, up to action-independent shifts and explicit sampling and finite-width errors. On the constructed signed-action MDP family whose total reward is bounded by 1, we show that an exploration-then-commit algorithm can achieve $\widetilde{O}(d^3H^{1/3}T^{2/3})$ regret over $T$ episodes, using $K=\widetilde{O}(Hd)$ global updates. Our analysis connects bootstrapped feature acquisition, concurrent neural refinement, and finite-budget policy performance.
Zhaoyang Wang, Qianhui Wu, Boyu Gou, Demi Wang, Jiacheng Zhang, Peichun Hua, Qize Li, Shi Qiu 等 57 位作者
GUI web agents require realistic and interactive environments that remain stable during both evaluation and training. Live website evaluation suffers from changing content, access restrictions, and limited coverage of authenticated workflows, while existing synthetic environments for training often lack functional depth and visual fidelity. We propose WebHarbor, a suite of 153 executable and dockerized website environments that faithfully reconstruct the visual interfaces, content, and functional workflows of real-world web services under deterministic control. We build WebHarbor through task-driven human-agent collaboration, where environments evolve as new tasks expand their functional scope, coding agents implement the required changes, and human contributors audit visual fidelity, functional correctness, and task validity. The resulting suite comprises 3,518 tasks spanning multi-step and post-authentication workflows, where existing works often fail to cover. Beyond reliable evaluation, WebHarbor provides high-fidelity synthetic web environments for cost-efficient reinforcement learning (RL). We demonstrate that a Qwen 4B-level GUI agent trained with RL in WebHarbor generalizes to unseen tasks and performs competitively with leading open-source GUI web agents across four benchmarks. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/WebHarbor.
Fluid antenna systems (FASs) have shown that activating a single port from a densely packed antenna array can yield spatial diversity comparable to that of tens of independent antennas, a property that has substantially improved communication reliability and efficiency. The fluid antenna array (FAA) extends this concept to multi-port configurations while avoiding complex multi-dimensional spatial correlation, and offers significant geometrical flexibility under a finite aperture and a limited port budget. These attributes motivate environment-adaptive array geometry for sensing in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. Although this flexibility enables adaptive array geometries that exploit near-field distance-angle information, improving multi-parameter target estimation under communication and deployment constraints remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a planar FAA-assisted near-field ISAC framework for multiuser communication and target sensing. Specifically, we derive the Fisher information matrix (FIM) and the corresponding Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for the joint estimation of target range, zenith angle, azimuth angle, and radial velocity. Based on the derived CRB, we jointly optimize the FAA port positions and transmit beamforming to improve sensing accuracy while satisfying communication signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), transmit power, and physical deployment constraints. To solve the resulting non-convex problem, we develop a two-stage alternating optimization algorithm, in which transmit beamforming is optimized through semidefinite relaxation (SDR), while FAA port positions are successively optimized through discrete search and continuous refinement. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves favorable sensing performance while maintaining a reasonable computational cost.
AI assistants store values that a language model derived from a person's records under the person's own definitions, such as their important contacts. Keeping such a value correct takes two steps: detection, noticing that an input changed, and repair, producing the correct new value. Benchmarks that score only the final answer cannot tell which step failed, and they state every change as new text. Seeing this limitation, we present MemShift, a benchmark of five shifts: source revision, deletion, redefinition, writer switch, and export. The first three fork a synthetic world into branches that differ only in the shift. Gold values and dependencies are fixed before any text, and a deterministic scorer replaces an LLM judge. For a memory that reports its invalidations, MemShift shows for each changed item whether the memory noticed the change and whether its repair was right. Moreover, we build a reference memory with known detection and repair to validate the measure. By evaluating four open-weight LLMs, we find that detection helps only as much as repair allows: the LLMs re-derive few values computed by the person's definitions correctly, and programs that the LLM writes over typed records close most of the gap to exact recomputation. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zichuanxu/memshift.
Deep Research (DR) systems extend large language models into autonomous agents that decompose complex information needs, iteratively search the web, and synthesize evidence to answer challenging questions. However, their multi-stage execution may introduce robustness risks, as variations in user questions or intermediate search inputs may propagate across research stages and lead to incorrect answers. Existing evaluations focus on task-solving capabilities or robustness against external evidence disturbances, leaving intrinsic weaknesses in DR execution insufficiently explored. Thus, we conduct an empirical study of 1,932 execution trajectories from three representative DR systems and identify nine recurring defect categories across subquestion formulation, online search, and final reasoning. Guided by these findings, we propose EMBERS, an empirically motivated, defect-guided fuzzing framework for robustness testing of DR systems. Starting from correctly answered seed questions, EMBERS generates stage-targeted test inputs using defect-guided mutation, web-search-assisted fidelity assurance, and diversity-aware seed maintenance. Experiments across 16 framework--model--dataset settings show that EMBERS achieves 3.21 times the failure-discovery throughput of the strongest baseline under identical testing budgets. Human and LLM-assisted evaluations demonstrate that most generated inputs preserve the original information need and necessary contextual constraints. Moreover, model fine-tuning experiments show consistent-answer performance improvement, highlighting their value for robustness testing and model improvement.
Embodied Learning of Reward for Musculoskeletal Control with Vision Language Models
Saraswati Soedarmadji, Yunyue Wei, Chen Zhang, Yisong Yue, Yanan Sui
AI 速览：提出 MoVLR 框架，利用视觉语言模型迭代探索奖励空间，为高维肌肉骨骼系统的运动控制发现和精炼奖励函数。
Discovering effective reward functions remains a fundamental challenge in motor control of high-dimensional musculoskeletal systems. While humans can describe movement goals explicitly such as "walking forward with an upright posture," the underlying control strategies that realize these goals are largely implicit, making it difficult to directly design rewards from high-level goals and natural language descriptions. We introduce Motion from Vision-Language Representation (MoVLR), a framework that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to bridge the gap between goal specification and movement control. Rather than relying on handcrafted rewards, MoVLR iteratively explores the reward space through iterative interaction between control optimization and VLM feedback, aligning control policies with physically coordinated behaviors. Our approach transforms language and vision-based assessments into structured guidance for embodied learning, enabling the discovery and refinement of reward functions for high-dimensional musculoskeletal locomotion and manipulation. These results suggest that VLMs can effectively ground abstract motion descriptions in the implicit principles governing physiological motor control.
Wenjiang Zhang, Sifeng Wang, Yuwei Su, Xinyu Li, Chen Zhang, Suyu Zhong
Visual neural decoding seeks to reconstruct or infer perceived visual stimuli from brain activity patterns, providing critical insights into human cognition and enabling transformative applications in brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence. Current approaches, however, remain constrained by the scarcity of high-quality stimulus-brain response pairs and the inherent semantic mismatch between neural representations and visual content. Inspired by perceptual variability and co-adaptive strategy of the biological systems, we propose a novel self-supervised architecture, named NeuroBridge, which integrates Cognitive Prior Augmentation (CPA) with Shared Semantic Projector (SSP) to promote effective cross-modality alignment. Specifically, CPA simulates perceptual variability by applying asymmetric, modality-specific transformations to both EEG signals and images, enhancing semantic diversity. Unlike previous approaches, SSP establishes a bidirectional alignment process through a co-adaptive strategy, which mutually aligns features from two modalities into a shared semantic space for effective cross-modal learning. NeuroBridge surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods under both intra-subject and inter-subject settings. In the intra-subject scenario, it achieves the improvements of 12.3% in top-1 accuracy and 10.2% in top-5 accuracy, reaching 63.2% and 89.9% respectively on a 200-way zero-shot retrieval task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of the proposed framework for neural visual decoding.
Khai Le-Duc, Nguyen Kim Hai Bui, An Ngo, Nam D. Hoang, Yueqi Song, Jiarui Liu, Thai Quoc Hoang, Fang Wu 等 14 位作者
Vision-language models can get individual judgments right while struggling to recover and consistently use the exact properties of a 3D object. To characterize this gap, we introduce BedBench, a controlled benchmark of thirteen procedurally generated tasks spanning individual judgments and composite answers. Across twelve open-weight and four frontier models, per-color counting exposes a pronounced weakness: humans achieve 93.3% accuracy, compared with 7.2% for the best model. Targeted fine-tuning raises one model's accuracy from 3.0% to 68.6%, but reveals a further difficulty: its answers about the most common colors remain inconsistent with its own per-color counts. Supplying those counts as text improves its judgments, showing that recovering a property does not mean using it consistently. Reasoning, scaling, and added visual cues each improve individual judgments, but none makes exact answers reliable. To locate the difficulty, we probe Qwen3.5-27B: exact per-color counts remain recoverable at the language model's input, yet the model's answers rarely recover them (65.0% for the probe vs. 3.0% for the model). Image-removal controls further show that some apparent successes require no visual evidence. These findings motivate evaluating 3D reasoning by exact correctness, consistent use, and image dependence, rather than accuracy alone. Code and dataset are publicly available: https://github.com/leduckhai/BedBench
Super-telephoto imaging on mobile phones suffers from complex, device-dependent degradations that are poorly captured by conventional handcrafted pipelines. Collecting large-scale aligned training pairs across different phones and diverse scenes, however, is both costly and difficult to scale. We therefore study whether device-specific degradations can be learned from only a small number of physical captures and transferred for training a unified super-resolution (SR) model. Our key idea is to factor degradation learning into two learnable components: one captures the device-specific imaging characteristics under well-resolved conditions, while the other captures the additional information loss and artifacts that arise in super-telephoto imaging. We build a paired benchmark across three phone brands (Huawei, Apple, and vivo) by photographing the same content at two display sizes and zoom settings. The larger displayed image is captured at the phone's maximum optical zoom setting, while the smaller image is photographed directly at the phone's highest native zoom setting through the phone's native imaging pipeline. The benchmark contains 519 training and 60 held-out pairs. We use the benchmark to learn device-specific degradation, then apply it to external images to synthesize thousands of additional pairs to train our UniTele SR model. Relative to the pretrained Qwen and FLUX backbones before adaptation, the full UniTele training recipe substantially improves paired restoration fidelity and perceptual similarity on the held-out benchmark and yields markedly more stable and visually faithful restorations.
Larger models and longer contexts make the KV cache a memory and bandwidth bottleneck. We introduce Block-GTQ, a framework that uses the two-dimensional frequency blocks of rotary position embeddings (RoPE) to allocate cached-key precision. A blockwise logit-error bound motivates a label-free query-key energy score, which we combine with codec-dependent rate penalties. Under equal-cost budgets and diminishing marginal gains, largest-marginal-gain allocation exactly minimizes the separable integer proxy. We instantiate Block-GTQ with TurboQuant-MSE (TQ-MSE), grouping equal-rate blocks to support attention over packed caches without materializing a decoded fp16 KV cache. Across ten model configurations, K-only diagnostics reduce layer-averaged logit mean absolute error by about 32-80% relative to uniform TQ-MSE, improving all 367 layers at both 2- and 3-bit average logical key rates. At K2V2 (2 average logical bits per K/V coordinate) on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) average from 70.6 to 97.4 and LongBench-EN from 33.7 to 44.9; K2V2 gains also hold on the tested 32B and 70B models. On DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B at K3V2, without fp16 sink or recent-token buffers, it achieves 49.6/38.8% avg@8 on AIME 2024/2025 versus fp16's 54.2/37.9%, where uniform TQ-MSE scores zero on both. On Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 serving on one H800 reduces resident KV footprint by a factor of 3.24 and retains perplexity close to fp16 at 128K, while uniform TQ-MSE degrades severely.
Yingyuan Yang, Tian Lan, Yifei Gao, Yimeng Lu, Xuming An, Wenjun He, Meng Wang, Chenghao Liu 等 9 位作者
Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) requires identifying both immediate Point Anomalies and long-range Context Anomalies. However, existing foundation models face a fundamental trade-off: 1D temporal models provide fine-grained pointwise localization but lack a global contextual perspective, while 2D vision-based models capture global patterns but suffer from information bottlenecks due to a lack of temporal alignment and coarse-grained pointwise detection. To resolve this dilemma, we propose VETime, the first TSAD framework that unifies temporal and visual modalities through fine-grained visual-temporal alignment and dynamic fusion. VETime introduces a Reversible Image Conversion and a Patch-Level Temporal Alignment module to establish a shared visual-temporal timeline, preserving discriminative details while maintaining temporal sensitivity. Furthermore, we design an Anomaly Window Contrastive Learning mechanism and a Task-Adaptive Multi-Modal Fusion to adaptively integrate the complementary perceptual strengths of both modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VETime significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in zero-shot scenarios, achieving superior localization precision with lower computational overhead than current vision-based approaches. Code available at: https://github.com/yyyangcoder/VETime .
Junnan Nie, Zitian Fan, Jiachen Zhang, Junyi Lao, Likui Zhang, Chenghao Liu, Xiaoyang Lu, Yunbo Wang 等 17 位作者
Learning task progress from robot demonstrations provides a practical way to construct dense shaping rewards for robotic reinforcement learning. A common approach uses normalized demonstration time as progress labels, implicitly assuming monotonically increasing task progress. During policy exploration, however, actual task progress can stall or even regress. Such models may mistake regressions for progress, assigning positive shaping rewards to actions that cause progress loss. Real suboptimal and failed executions offer corrective experience, but assigning absolute progress values to their states is difficult. Our key observation is that stalls, regressions, and recoveries establish local relative progress relations even when absolute progress is unknown. We introduce Event2Reward, which uses normalized temporal labels to anchor the progress scale and these within-trajectory relations to constrain local changes, combining absolute and relative progress supervision. Its progress predictions serve as potentials for reward shaping. We curate an event-annotated dataset from approximately 100K raw real-robot execution records, covering successful, suboptimal, and failed executions, without requiring framewise absolute progress labels. Under the same training budgets, Event2Reward improves average policy success by 18.16 percentage points over a baseline using only sparse task rewards across 40 tasks in four LIBERO suites. On real robots, average success after 30 minutes of wall-clock training reaches 60.0% on three precise insertion tasks and 90.0% on three object manipulation tasks, exceeding the sparse-reward baseline under the same budget by 36.7 and 23.3 percentage points, respectively. Ablation studies further show that absolute progress supervision and relative progress relations are complementary, with joint supervision yielding better downstream policy learning.
Proactive agents must decide not only what to say but also whether and when to intervene. Many current systems rely on brittle heuristics or indiscriminate long reasoning, which offers little control over the benefit-burden tradeoff. We formulate the problem as cost-sensitive selective intervention and present PRISM, a novel framework that couples a decision-theoretic gate with a dual-process reasoning architecture. At inference time, the agent intervenes only when a calibrated probability of user acceptance exceeds a threshold derived from asymmetric costs of missed help and false alarms. Inspired by festina lente (Latin: "make haste slowly"), we gate by an acceptance-calibrated, cost-derived threshold and invoke a resource-intensive Slow mode with counterfactual checks only near the decision boundary, concentrating computation on ambiguous and high-stakes cases. Training uses gate-aligned, schema-locked distillation: a teacher running the full PRISM pipeline provides dense, executable supervision on unlabeled interaction traces, while the student learns a response policy that is explicitly decoupled from the intervention gate to enable tunable and auditable control. On ProactiveBench, PRISM reduces false alarms by 22.78% and improves F1 by 20.14% over strong baselines. These results show that principled decision-theoretic gating, paired with selective slow reasoning and aligned distillation, yields proactive agents that are precise, computationally efficient, and controllable. To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code, models, and resources at https://prism-festinalente.github.io/; all experiments use the open-source ProactiveBench benchmark.
Chen Zhang, Kepu Zhang, Jiatong Zhang, Xiao Zhang, Jun Xu
Query correction is a critical entry point in modern search pipelines, demanding high accuracy strictly within real-time latency constraints. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves accuracy but incurs prohibitive latency for real-time query correction. A potential solution is to output an answer before reasoning to reduce latency; however, under autoregressive decoding, the early answer is independent of subsequent reasoning, preventing the model from leveraging its reasoning capability to improve accuracy. To address this issue, we propose Sandwich Reasoning (SandwichR), a novel approach that explicitly aligns a fast initial answer with post-hoc reasoning, enabling low-latency query correction without sacrificing reasoning-aware accuracy. SandwichR follows an Answer-Reasoning-Answer paradigm, producing an initial correction, an explicit reasoning process, and a final refined correction. To align the initial answer with post-reasoning insights, we design a consistency-aware reinforcement learning (RL) strategy: a dedicated consistency reward enforces alignment between the initial and final corrections, while margin-based rejection sampling prioritizes borderline samples where reasoning drives the most impactful corrective gains. Additionally, we construct a high-quality query correction dataset, addressing the lack of specialized benchmarks for complex query correction. Experimental results demonstrate that SandwichR achieves SOTA accuracy comparable to standard CoT while delivering a 40-70% latency reduction, resolving the latency-accuracy trade-off in online search.
Fast inference and strict constraint satisfaction are essential for learning-based decision-making. Existing methods often rely on constraint-specific projections or feasible-set parameterizations, while iterative repair can be costly. We introduce Convex-SKM-Net, a convex constraint-satisfaction layer that forms linearization halfspaces from residual and (sub)gradient oracles without constraint-specific inequality projectors. It applies fixed-depth dual projected-gradient descent (dual PGD) to minimum-displacement block problems using GPU-friendly matrix operations. We jointly learn the predictor and a positive-definite mobility, adapting the correction geometry to improve objective quality. We prove convergence of the outer iterates at fixed dual depth and linear convergence in distance under Slater's condition and bounded subgradients. All our test outputs on three second-order-cone model-predictive control (SOC-MPC) horizons and six power-system convex relaxations satisfy a $10^{-3}$ feasibility tolerance. Comparisons with the latest constraint-satisfaction methods show inference speedups of up to $144.3\times$ on SOC-MPC and $7.7\times$ on a convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) benchmark with joint training. On QCQP, the mean objective gap is $0.012\%$, with full test feasibility at $10^{-4}$. Learning mobility reduces the five-seed affine-task mean gap by $22.4\%$ and improves gaps in matched power-system comparisons.
Active simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) addresses the problem of planning robot motion to build complete and accurate maps of unknown environments through efficient exploration while maintaining high localization accuracy. This raises a dilemma between exploring unknown spaces to expand coverage and exploiting visited regions to perform active loop closures. Despite numerous prior works on ground robots, aerial robots with high agility and constrained sensor suites face more significant localization drift and thereby demand dedicated active SLAM planning. Moreover, a unified strategy that adapts performance based on task-specific priorities remains an open question. In this article, we introduce RAVEN, a unified active SLAM framework for Rapid Autonomous Visual ExploratioN using quadrotors, which systematically accounts for localization uncertainty. The framework starts with identifying frontiers and active loop closure candidates, from which global tour candidates are generated. These candidates are evaluated using a utility vector that separately quantifies exploration efficiency and localization accuracy, and the final tour is selected according to a prioritization parameter ranging from $[0,1]$. Finally, a perception-aware navigation planner generates smooth execution trajectories that minimize visual state estimation error based on the online Fisher information field that provides visual localization information in real-time. Benchmark evaluations demonstrate that RAVEN outperforms state-of-the-art active SLAM methods, highlighting its advantages in producing a spectrum of performance across prioritizations. Fully onboard field experiments with a customized stereo-inertial quadrotor further validate its practical applicability in challenging environments. The source code will be released to benefit the community.
Yuchen Zhang, Yaxiong Wang, Yujiao Wu, Lianwei Wu, Qi Zhang, Li Zhu, Chaofeng Dong, Le Wu 等 9 位作者
Multimodal forgery detection is commonly studied under a static assumption: training attacks are expected to approximate those encountered after deployment. This assumption becomes increasingly fragile as generators, editing systems, and multimodal large language models continually introduce new forgery mechanisms and forensic evidence. We formulate this problem as attack-incremental continual multimodal forgery detection, where the binary real/fake interface remains fixed while emerging attacks must be learned without forgetting previous ones. We introduce Fable-Bench, which organizes attack evolution through complementary joint-modality, text-side, and image-side protocols. We further propose ARISE (Authentic Reference-Informed Stability Enhancement), motivated by the open-ended forged class and the comparatively reusable geometry of authentic content. ARISE fits a real-only Gaussian mixture model to projected authentic replay representations as a compact historical reference. Meanwhile, the proposed Gaussian-Responsibility-Aware Stability Preservation (GRASP) derives a sample-adaptive anisotropic metric that strongly constrains historically stable representation directions while retaining plasticity elsewhere. Our Vulnerability-Aware Replay (VAR) further estimates stage-wise vulnerability from authentic-density degradation, forged-to-authentic boundary confusion, and authentic-mode occupancy drift, then assigns bounded replay emphasis to fragile stages. All adaptive signals are obtained from training-time replay statistics, while inference uses only the original multimodal backbone and binary classification head. Experiments across three attack-evolution protocols and multiple detector architectures demonstrate improved historical retention and final average performance over representative continual-learning baselines.
Expanding multilingual ASR systems to new languages is challenging when adaptation must preserve previously supported languages without replaying source-language training data. We study this problem in connector-based Speech LLMs, where a trainable connector maps speech representations into a frozen large language model. We evaluate target-update construction and merging strategies for adapting the connector while preserving source-language performance. In single-target expansion, target-only fine-tuning and standard TIES merging learn new languages but cause severe source-language forgetting, while SSU-Wanda+TIES gives the best source-preserving trade-off. In multi-target expansion, update merging provides stable source retention, whereas recursive expansion can improve target adaptation under favorable orders but is highly order-sensitive. These results show that multilingual ASR expansion requires balancing target acquisition, source retention, and interactions among target-language updates.
Jiawei Lu, Chen Zhang, Jinwei Lu, Yuanwei Song, Yuanfeng Song, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong
Users often request charts without knowing which database or table holds the relevant data. Such requests may be ambiguous, and users may ask follow-up questions to deepen their analysis or iteratively refine existing charts. A useful assistant must therefore discover relevant data sources among heterogeneous databases, ask clarifying questions when needed, and track evolving user intent while preserving constraints established in earlier turns. Yet recent text-to-visualization agents typically rely on static agent harnesses that are predefined and remain unchanged despite recurring failures across tasks. To address this limitation, we introduce RSIV-Harness, which keeps the language model weights fixed and applies Recursive Self-Improvement to revise the surrounding harness from the agent's own failure traces. To balance flexible self-improvement with stability, we introduce a four-layer framework that evaluates proposed harness revisions through anchor and memory checks, refining those that pass and restoring the best validated harness otherwise. We further introduce ODAC-Vis, a benchmark with 640 tasks for Open-Domain, Ambiguous, and Conversational text-to-visualization that jointly evaluates open-domain data discovery, ambiguity resolution, multi-turn visualization refinement, and executable chart generation. Experiments show that a single round of RSIV-Harness improves all six evaluation metrics relative to the seed harness, with particularly large gains in executability (+28.02 points) and chart structure (+34.01 points), demonstrating the ability to learn from task-solving experience and turn recurring failures across tasks into substantial performance improvements.
Min Zeng, Xin Wen, Xi Chen, Yichen Zhang, Wen-Xin Zhou
We develop a derivative-free temporal-difference (TD) framework for calibrating black-box simulators using one-step transitions from a target system and noisy simulator-generated continuation values. The calibration parameter is defined through Bellman orthogonality, recovering the physical parameter under correct simulator specification and yielding a near-optimal $L_2$ approximation of the policy value under misspecification. We propose three TD algorithms based on random-direction finite differences, distinguished by their query costs and reuse of noisy simulator evaluations. We establish almost-sure convergence, last-iterate mean-square error bounds, and central limit theorems for Polyak-Ruppert averages across four query-noise regimes. Our analysis reveals a specification-dependent bias phenomenon: for two algorithms, the finite-difference bias of the TD estimating equation vanishes at the calibration target under correct specification, even when the gradient surrogate remains biased. This permits a fixed perturbation radius and rate exponents approaching $1/2$ in the simulator rollout budget, whereas misspecification generally recovers the classical Kiefer-Wolfowitz rates. We also develop a few-replicate online bootstrap that yields Student-$t$ calibrated confidence intervals under negligible query noise, and identify a covariance mismatch that can invalidate conventional multiplier inference along Markov trajectories. Finally, a second-stage TD recursion corrects the remaining value discrepancy without additional simulator queries.
Dianyi Yang, Mengya Liu, Zhumei Wang, Yu Liu, Xiaochen Zhang, Yixuan Li, Le Ma, Yuhang Yang 等 12 位作者
Learning generalizable humanoid loco-manipulation remains bottlenecked by costly real-world demonstrations. Simulation provides a scalable alternative, but requires visually faithful, physics-ready scenes and executable whole-body motions. We present Zero-HLM, a real-to-sim-to-real framework that transforms smartphone captures and simulated source demonstrations into scalable training data for humanoid loco-manipulation. Gaussian-guided agentic real-to-sim reconstruction aligns visual and physical scenes; motion-environment co-adaptation uses rollout feedback to correct whole-body references and interaction geometry. We generate 4,800 physically validated demonstrations for zero-shot transfer across three Unitree G1 tasks. Simulation-trained GR00T N1.7 achieves 66.7% mean full-task success, versus 46.7% with real-data training. On generalized configurations, expanded simulation training raises pooled success from 23% for base-trained real-data policies to 69%, without additional real demonstrations. Project page: https://young-bit.github.io/zero-hlm/
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in embodied agents to interpret visual inputs, reason about spatial relationships, and make task-level decisions based on that reasoning. However, a fundamental capability mismatch remains: general VLMs can reason about the overall task but often miss the visual details that determine success, while specialist vision models can capture those details but cannot translate them into task-level decisions. In this work, we propose SpatialCLI, a framework that teaches VLMs to reason with spatial tools and progressively internalize the specialist perceptual capabilities they provide. SpatialCLI proceeds in three stages: (1) Call exposes specialist vision models as spatial tools to augment the VLM's perception; (2) Learn uses Cold-Start SFT and agentic RL to improve tool use; and (3) Internalize verbalizes successful tool-use trajectories to internalize specialist perceptual capabilities. We further introduce SpatialCLI-Bench, a 516-example benchmark for compositional perception across localization, segmentation, depth, and pose. On MindCube, SpatialCLI raises Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct from 29.3% to 84.6% with tools, surpassing GPT-5.6 Sol with tools (72.1%), while retaining 73.8% without tools after internalization.
Bang Xiao, Baosheng Jin, Jinhan Niu, Xingchen Zhang, Hua Shen
Urban heritage tours are often delivered through fixed scripts, leaving limited room for visitors' situated questions, language preferences, or requests for evidence. We present ECHOES, an adaptive LLM-powered AR glasses docent for evidence-grounded interpretation of historical buildings. Specifically, the agent adapts along three dimensions: it modifies response structure according to the type of visitor question (identification, architectural detail, evidence-seeking, or route inquiry); it accumulates session-level interest signals from repeated questions and expressed curiosity to shape later explanations; and it tracks language preference and retrieval context across turns to maintain conversational continuity. The core of ECHOES is an LLM agent initialized as a source-aware urban heritage docent that realizes this adaptation through dialogue and preference context maintained across the session. Around this agent, ECHOES integrates visual site grounding, a self-built historical knowledge base supporting retrieval-augmented generation, and concise multilingual AR output designed for glanceable use. Through a working prototype centered on Shanghai's East Nanjing Road and the Bund, we demonstrate how an adaptive LLM-powered AR docent can transform historical tours from scripted narration into situated, question-responsive, and source-aware conversations.
Jiarui Liu, Terry Jingchen Zhang Vector Institute, Ryan Faulkner DeepMind, Xuanqiang Angelo Huang, Vilém Zouhar Department of Computer Science, ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Dominik Glandorf EPFL - EPF Lausanne, Isabel Dahlgren, Rishit Dagli University of Toronto 等 21 位作者
Expert writing feedback from experienced researchers is critical for early-career scholars to improve their manuscripts, yet high-quality feedback often remains scarce because reviewing research papers is labor-intensive. Emerging AI-powered writing assistants largely focus on grammar fixes or simulating peer review with final scores, yet they fall short of providing concrete, actionable suggestions that help students improve their papers during drafting. We present PaperMentor, a human-centered writing assistant system that delivers actionable suggestions as Overleaf-native inline comments while leaving the actual writing entirely to human authors. PaperMentor integrates an expert skill library carefully curated from established researchers’ writing advice with 12 specialized agents covering different aspects of paper writing, such as formatting compliance, phrasing accuracy, and terminology consistency. In a user study (n=14), 90.6% of the generated comments were rated actionable and 67.5% were rated valid, significantly outperforming a GPT-5.2 baseline without the skill library. We release PaperMentor as open source for public use.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Navya Gupta Singapore Institute of Technology and Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, Rishitej Reddy Vyalla, Avinash Anand, Chhavi Kirtani, Erik Cambria Nanyang Technological University, Zhengchen Zhang, Zhengkui Wang, Timothy Liu NVIDIA 等 11 位作者
Curriculum learning helps language models tackle complex reasoning by gradually increasing task difficulty. However, it often fails to generate consistent step-by-step reasoning, especially in multilingual and low-resource settings where cross-lingual transfer from English to Indian languages remains limited. We propose IRIS: Interleaved Reinforcement with Incremental Staged Curriculum, a two-axis framework that combines Supervised Fine-Tuning on progressively harder problems (vertical axis) with Reverse Curriculum Reinforcement Learning to reduce reliance on step-by-step guidance (horizontal axis). We design a composite reward combining correctness, step-wise alignment, continuity, and numeric incentives, optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We release CL-Math, a dataset of 29k problems with step-level annotations in English, Hindi, and Marathi. Across standard benchmarks and curated multilingual test sets, IRIS consistently improves performance, with strong results on math reasoning tasks and substantial gains in low-resource and bilingual settings, alongside modest improvements in high-resource languages. Our code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/avinanand/IRIS-Interleaved-Reinforcement-
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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
Yuhang Li, Chenchen Zhang, Ruilin Lv, Ao Liu Tencent, Ken Deng, Yuanxing Zhang Kuaishou- 快手科技, Jiaheng Liu Nanjing University, Bo Zhou
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at algorithmic code generation, they struggle with front-end development, where correctness is judged on rendered pixels and interaction. We present ReLook, an agentic, vision-grounded reinforcement learning framework that empowers an agent to close a robust generate–diagnose–refine loop by invoking a multimodal LLM (MLLM) as a tool. During training, the agent employs an MLLM-in-the-loop to serve as a visual critic, evaluating code via screenshots and providing actionable feedback. Crucially, we enforce a strict zero-reward policy for invalid renders to guarantee renderability and mitigate reward hacking. To prevent behavioral collapse, we introduce Forced Optimization, a strict acceptance rule that admits only improving revisions, yielding monotonically better trajectories. At inference, we decouple the critic and run a lightweight, critic-free self-edit cycle, keeping latency comparable to base decoding while retaining most of the gains. Across three widely used benchmarks, ReLook consistently outperforms strong baselines in vision-grounded front-end code generation, highlighting the benefits of agentic perception, visual rewards, and training–inference decoupling.
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cs.CL · cs.AI · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表