AI 速览：TouchBridge 通过软硬件协同设计与触觉条件重定向，把人类演示直接转换为机器人训练数据，用于微调 VLA 模型完成接触丰富操作。
Human demonstrations offer an efficient and scalable source of data for dexterous robot manipulation, but differences in sensing and hand morphology complicate the transfer of contact-rich interactions. We present TouchBridge, a hardware--software co-designed framework for human-to-robot data transformation. A wearable human demonstration interface and a corresponding robot interface establish cross-embodiment correspondence in visual and fingertip tactile sensing. We introduce Tac-Retarget, a tactile-conditioned retargeting method that uses measured contact to align fingertip contact patches and preserve their spatial relations within and across hands. Unlike object-aware or simulation-based transfer pipelines, Tac-Retarget requires no object mesh, object-pose estimate, or physics simulation for retargeting, enabling direct and scalable conversion of human demonstrations into robot-domain training data. Combined with visual synthesis and camera-anchored action conversion, TouchBridge produces robot-domain demonstrations for fine-tuning a pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) model. Across four real-world contact-rich tasks, policies fine-tuned solely on TouchBridge-converted human demonstrations achieve a 72.5% average success rate, compared with 77.5% using an equal number of teleoperated robot demonstrations, while human demonstration collection is 7.0x faster. Under the same policy and training setup, Tac-Retarget outperforms DexPilot and UniDex by 25.0 and 42.5 percentage points, respectively.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) has reshaped how sellers compete for visibility in LLM-generated rankings. By embedding persuasive arguments in the content they control, sellers can influence how generative engines rank products and web pages and push their own items to the top. Existing defenses either detect harmful intent or unnatural language, which fluent GEO content often lacks, or rewrite all candidates, which alters legitimate listings without identifying the manipulated ones. However, these approaches overlook the persuasive structure through which GEO attacks influence LLM-based rankings. To address this gap, we present SCI-Defense, a framework for detecting persuasion-structured ranking manipulation, in which an LLM judge scores five persuasion devices grounded in research on influence and deception: authority, social proof, scarcity and urgency, comparative claims, and narrative purposiveness. Two lightweight gates for unnatural strings and inflated relevance complement the judge, and flagged candidates are demoted rather than rewritten, each with a record of the candidate and the criterion that triggered the flag. On 1,152 optimized CORE attacks across six Amazon product categories and six MS MARCO web domains, SCI-Defense detects 89.6% of reasoning attacks and 96.2% of review attacks at a 1.2% false positive rate and blocks 96.1% of the attacks that pushed their target into the top three. On a 120-query subset, paraphrasing and truncation block a similar share of attacks but push 4.0--4.5% of honest items out of the top three, compared with 0.6% for SCI-Defense.
Much of the manipulation in influencer content is not false but disproportionate, framing accurate facts as historic, urgent, or catastrophic. Existing approaches either verify factual claims or detect clickbait and propaganda in single-platform, single-language text; however, they overlook where such framing originates, because they treat a post and the replies beneath it as one unit. To address this gap, we measure rhetorical distortion with one instrument applied identically across six platforms and two languages, classifying creator posts and their replies separately. Our three-tier pipeline detects five literature-grounded dimensions (Significance Inflation, Anxiety Manufacturing, Novelty Claims, Loaded Language, and Temporal Distortion): bilingual lexical rules propose candidates, negative filters cancel known false positives, and an LLM verifies or relabels the candidates. This design keeps labels transparent and comparable across platforms, calls the LLM on only 14% of posts, and supports validation against human annotators and a second model. On 13,060 posts from 330 accounts on RSS/newsletters, YouTube, Bluesky, Reddit, Weibo, and X/Twitter, platform is far more strongly associated with account-level distortion than content category (partial $η^2=0.49$ vs. $0.09$), and X/Twitter scores highest (DI 7.74 vs. 0.78 for RSS). On X/Twitter, the top-5 replies under a post carry 3.5x the distortion of the tweet they answer (1.5x at equal length), while creator tweets alone are indistinguishable from YouTube and Bluesky; two human annotators and GPT-4o confirm this gap. Measured distortion on threaded platforms thus lives largely in the audience layer, which calls for measuring creator and reply text separately.
Aditya Ranjan Jha, Jason Zhijingcheng Yu, Umang Mathur, Prateek Saxena
Hardware components communicate through clock-cycle-sensitive protocols. Hardware Description Languages (HDLs), however, provide limited support for expressing these protocols or for checking that independently developed components agree on them. When components disagree, the composed design can perform unsynchronized exchanges or stop making progress. We call these failures communication-safety violations. Communication safety is thus a global property, determined by interactions between components. This makes it difficult to check modularly. This paper presents Pact, a typed extension of Anvil for modular verification of communication safety in synchronous hardware. Pact types describe message-passing, control-flow, and clock-cycle behaviour. Each component is checked against its type. Compatible types guarantee that the components compose into a communication-safe system. Pact also supports incremental design. It can check a subsystem before the rest of the system exists. The check produces a summary type that captures the communication behaviour left for future compositions. To reduce annotation burden, Pact infers types by abstracting payload values while preserving communication, timing, control, and fairness. These inferred types are optimal for the checker: whenever some checker-accepted types can prove compatibility, the inferred types can prove it as well. Type inference and type checking are decidable, and compatibility is decided by a sound and complete algorithm. We implement Pact by extending the Anvil compiler and evaluate it along five dimensions: detecting communication errors in incremental design, expressiveness on ten clock-cycle-accurate translations of open-source hardware IPs, compatibility-checking time, generated hardware overhead, and annotation burden. Pact expresses realistic protocols and verifies all ten benchmarks in reasonable time.
A benchmark is not merely a collection of test questions; it naturally induces an empirical measure over difficulty. In this work, we develop this measure-based view of benchmark evaluation. This perspective allows us to identify and formalize two central failure modes: measure mismatch, where the benchmark difficulty distribution differs from the intended difficulty distribution, and coverage gaps, where uncovered regions along the difficulty axis prevent benchmarks from detecting meaningful localized training progress. We propose two diagnostic metrics that capture these two failure modes and provide rigorous theoretical guarantees. Empirically, we analyze 25 popular benchmarks spanning 7 domains using carefully estimated item difficulties. Our results show that many benchmarks implicitly overweight certain difficulty regions, so their leaderboard conclusions should be interpreted with caution; others leave substantial portions of the difficulty axis uncovered, limiting their ability to monitor the model improvement process. Finally, we turn diagnosis into action by introducing BenchFill, a simple difficulty-targeted item rewriting algorithm that effectively reduces local coverage gaps.
Jiahuan Zhang, Shunwen Bai Zhejiang University, Tianheng Wang Hangzhou Institute of Medicine Chinese Academy of Science, KaiWen Guo Westlake University, Zijia Song National University of Defense Technology, Hanqing WU, Guozheng Rao Tianjin University, Kai Han The University of Hong Kong 等 9 位作者
Humans naturally possess the spatial reasoning ability to form and manipulate images and structures of objects in space. There is an increasing effort to endow Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with similar spatial reasoning capabilities. However, it remains unclear whether these models truly understand and manipulate spatial objects or not. To address this question, we propose a new evaluation framework aimed at assessing the performance of VLMs in spatial deformation reasoning tasks. Specifically, we construct a benchmark for spatial deformation reasoning from 2D to 3D. We explore whether the model can effectively perform spatial deformation reasoning from two directions: forward reasoning (given the operations, find the final state) and reverse reasoning (given the final state, determine the operations). We adopt a ladder competition format, using the number of deformation steps as the level classification criterion, with the goal of exploring the boundaries of the model’s deformation reasoning capabilities. Interestingly, the benchmarking results reveal that almost no model demonstrates plausible spatial deformation reasoning abilities. Furthermore, even after applying targeted training and mainstream reasoning enhancement methods, the models are still unable to perform well on 3D spatial deformation reasoning.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Sashuai Zhou Zhejiang University, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu Alibaba Group, Hanqing Yang, Yue Cao, Junpeng Ma, Yinchao Ma, Jun Song Alibaba Group 等 12 位作者
Despite impressive progress in high-fidelity image synthesis, generative models still struggle with logic-intensive instruction following, exposing a persistent reasoning–execution gap. Meanwhile, closed-source systems (e.g., Nano Banana) have demonstrated strong reasoning-driven image generation, highlighting a substantial gap to current open-source models. We argue that closing this gap requires not merely better visual generators, but executable reasoning: decomposing high-level intents into grounded, verifiable plans that directly steer the generative process. To this end, we propose Unified Thinker, a task-agnostic reasoning architecture for general image generation, designed as a unified planning core that can plug into diverse generators and workflows. Unified Thinker decouples a dedicated Thinker from the image Generator, enabling modular upgrades of reasoning without retraining the entire generative model. We further introduce a two-stage training paradigm: we first build a structured planning interface for the Thinker, then apply reinforcement learning to ground its policy in pixel-level feedback, encouraging plans that optimize visual correctness over textual plausibility. Extensive experiments on text-to-image generation and image editing show that Unified Thinker substantially improves image reasoning and generation quality.
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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
Yun He Meta, Wenzhe Li Princeton University, Hejia Zhang Facebook, Songlin Li Facebook and Stanford University, Karishma Mandyam, Sopan Khosla Facebook, Yuanhao Xiong University of California, Los Angeles, Nanshu Wang Facebook 等 25 位作者
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF)—especially for complex, multi-turn, and system-prompted instructions—remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation and effective training for such capabilities are hindered by the lack of high-quality, human-annotated benchmarks and reliable, interpretable reward signals. In this work, we introduce AdvancedIF, a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs’ ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. We also open-source the evaluation script of AdvancedIF. We further propose RIFL (Rubric-based Instruction-Following Learning), a novel post-training pipeline that leverages rubric generation, a finetuned rubric verifier, and reward shaping to enable effective reinforcement learning for instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIFL substantially improves the instruction-following abilities of LLMs, achieving a 6.7% absolute gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. Our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in RIFL. This work establishes rubrics as a powerful tool for both training and evaluating advanced IF in LLMs, paving the way for more capable and reliable AI systems.
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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