Shumao Wu, Kongcheng Zhang, Jianqiang Huang, Baisheng Lai
Agent trajectories often contain both successful decisions and failed attempts, yet optimization with sparse trajectory-level rewards struggles to identify which critical decisions should be reinforced or suppressed. We observe that meaningful distinctions among on-policy trajectories can be distilled into natural-language process rubrics and used as process supervision signals. Based on this insight, we propose Online Rubric Self-Distillation (ORSD), which leverages self-derived process rubrics for dense token-level supervision, thereby augmenting outcome-centric reinforcement learning. Specifically, the current policy independently generates multiple rubric bundles at each step according to the same group of trajectories, extracting candidate process rubrics from cross-trajectory behavioral differences. A frozen verifier then evaluates all rubric items against each trajectory in the group, and selects one candidate bundle based on bundle-level alignment between rubric satisfaction and task success. ORSD treats the selected rubric bundle as privileged information during training, then compares the log-likelihoods of the original tokens with and without the rubric. The resulting likelihood gap provides token-specific process credit, which is added to the original trajectory-level GRPO advantage through additive advantage shaping. ORSD thus bridges trajectory-level outcome supervision and fine-grained process supervision, enabling token-level credit assignment using process signals. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show that ORSD accelerates policy improvement and boosts final task performance for both Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B under the same environment-interaction budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/AnnaXChun/ORSD.
We study the problem of $K$-armed bandits with reward distributions belonging to a one-parameter exponential distribution family. In the literature, several criteria have been proposed to evaluate the performance of such algorithms, including Asymptotic Optimality, Minimax Optimality, Sub-UCB, and variance-adaptive regret bound. Thompson Sampling-based and Upper Confidence Bound-based algorithms have been employed to achieve some of these criteria. However, none of these algorithms simultaneously satisfy all the aforementioned criteria. In this paper, we design an algorithm, Exponential Kullback-LeiblerMaillard Sampling (abbrev. Exp-KL-MS), that achieves multiple optimality criteria simultaneously, including Asymptotic Optimality, minimax ratio with a $\sqrt{\ln (K)}$ factor, Sub-UCB, and a variance-adaptive regret bound. Our algorithm design follows the Minimum Empirical Divergence framework~\citep{honda2011asymptotically,maillard2011apprentissage}, with the exploration probability of arm $a$ proportional to $\text{exp}\left(-L(N_{t-1, a}) \text{KL}(\hatμ_{t-1, a}, \max_{a'} \hatμ_{t-1, a'})\right)$, where $L(\cdot)$ is an inverse temperature function, $N_{t-1, a}$ is the number of times arm $a$ has been pulled before time $t$, $\hatμ_{t-1, a}$ is the empirical mean of arm $a$ before time $t$, and $\text{KL}(\cdot, \cdot)$ is the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two distributions in the one-parameter exponential distribution family. Our analysis allows different choices of inverse temperature function $L(k)$. We also provide numerical simulations demonstrating the effectiveness of our algorithms.
We study the contextual combinatorial semi-bandit (CCSB) problem, where at each round, the learner observes a context, selects a combinatorial action consisting of a subset of basic arms, and receives the reward of each selected arm; its goal is to maximize its cumulative reward over time. While many previous works focus on CCSB problems with linear reward function approximation, the design of efficient algorithms for the CCSB problem with general reward function approximation is limited. In this work, we study the realizable setting where the learner has access to a reward function class $\mathcal{F}$ that contains the true reward function, and propose the $\mathrm{SquareCB{.}Comb}$ algorithm. We prove that $\mathrm{SquareCB{.}Comb}$ achieves a minimax optimal regret bound of $O(\sqrt{m A T \log |\mathcal{F}|})$, where $A$ is the number of arms, $m$ is the maximum number of arms in a combinatorial action, and $T$ is the time horizon. In addition, $\mathrm{SquareCB{.}Comb}$ is computationally efficient when we have an online regression oracle that can efficiently predict rewards of all arms given contexts, and the combinatorial action set admits either efficient linear optimization or efficient sampling given any target marginal probability on arms. We empirically verify the effectiveness of our algorithm in webpage recommendation and contextual shortest path problems.
Automatic rigging is a fundamental task for both static 3D and dynamic 4D mesh animation, yet existing methods do not provide a unified feedforward solution for these two settings. While static 3D riggers achieve strong quality, they often provide limited control over bone count and become temporally unstable when applied frame by frame to dynamic meshes. Existing 4D methods, in contrast, typically rely on expensive per-sequence optimization. We propose FlowRig, a template-free, data-efficient framework for unified 3D and 4D skeleton generation. Built on flow matching, FlowRig generates temporally aligned skeletons for an entire sequence in a single feedforward pass, while naturally handling single-mesh 3D rigging. The model further supports explicit skeleton-count control, uncertainty estimation for candidate selection, and masking-based interpolation, forecasting, and backcasting. To address limited paired 4D rigging data, we adopt a curriculum that initializes from large-scale 3D rigging data and adapts to mid-scale 4D mesh-skeleton data. Experiments show that FlowRig achieves strong static 3D rigging performance with controllable bone complexity, as well as high-quality and temporally consistent 4D reconstruction and prediction results.
Jianyang Gu, Jacob Beattie, Mridul Khurana, Julia Chae, Xi Xiao, Cheng Zhang, Anuj Karpatne, Wei-Lun Chao 等 10 位作者
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose visual representations into individual features, offering a promising basis for explaining model behavior. Interpreting these features typically relies on images or pixel regions that most strongly activate them. However, this evidence becomes ambiguous when multiple features with different semantics frequently activate in the same locations, such as texture and color in the same patterns. We propose Reconstructive SAE Intervention (RecSAEI), a framework that shifts feature explanation from passive observation to active visual reconstruction. By intervening on representations along SAE decoder directions and reconstructing the visual output, we provide direct evidence of a feature's semantic meaning. We demonstrate that our method successfully disambiguates feature meanings across multiple datasets and vision encoders. Furthermore, our framework grounds [CLS] SAE interventions in a sparse set of patch SAE decoder directions. Beyond stable target response, this attribution also exposes the compositional relationship between elementary visual patterns and high-level semantics. Our results advocate for intervention reconstruction as an essential complementary signal for explaining neural networks.
Video generation has progressed from isolated clips to coherent short-form audiovisual sequences, and the bottleneck is shifting from rendering to semantic control. This report summarizes the observations and insights on multimodal understanding gained from successive generations of Kling. We argue that generation quality is the projection of multimodal understanding through the entire data--conditioning--alignment--evaluation chain, and we examine this chain module by module. Kling-MLLM, a shared multimodal foundation model that unifies image, video, audio, synchronized audio--video, and interleaved inputs, is specialized for each downstream module. Because a DiT is trained on far fewer training samples than a language model, we treat captioning as a semantic contract that maximizes description density, and extend it to reference-grounded captioning that makes reference bindings explicit. Prompt enhancement translates user intent into this caption distribution: basic PE is derived from captions of compelling videos and refined with text-level and generator-in-the-loop reinforcement learning, while agentic PE refines the story and retrieves compelling examples. We show that a reliable text encoder comes from perceptual training rather than from stronger language ability, and that candidates can be screened from text alone before end-to-end training. Reward modeling pairs a general reward model for explainable, localized critiques with a decision reward model for fast multidimensional scoring, treating perceptual bandwidth as a first-class design parameter. Finally, we review task-specific automatic evaluation, focusing on protocols that expose scoring shortcuts and help trace failures to their upstream source. We hope these lessons offer practical guidance for building the understanding stack behind controllable video generation.
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.
Rwiddhi Chakraborty, Yinong Oliver Wang, Cheng Zhang, Fan Bai, Zhuoran Yu, Michael Kampffmeyer, Yong Jae Lee, Fernando De la Torre 等 9 位作者
Large video models have exhibited impressive performance on a wide range of visual question answering tasks, owing to the rise of powerful, pretrained text and vision encoders. The usefulness of such models have also been demonstrated on a wide range of benchmarks, with an important caveat - the dominant approach in these benchmarks evaluates multiple choice reasoning via text options. This is a natural way to test text-based reasoning in these models, and has led to significant insights regarding model behavior in the community. In this work, we ask a different question - what happens when the evaluation modality is visual, rather than text? We introduce three new vision-centric evaluation benchmarks in temporal frame retrieval, video future prediction, and causal memory distortion, all designed around evaluating visual understanding capabilities in large video models. Our approach complements the existing approaches to evaluate video understanding in frontier models. We show that current frontier models exhibit significant weakness when attempting to reason through visual queries, rather than text. We conclude with an extended analysis section that provides pointers for future improvements in visual understanding for large video models.
Reclamation of saline-alkali land requires management plans that account for soil and water conditions, treatment evidence, and financial constraints. This study develops Wenyao, an agricultural decision-support system integrating domain adaptation with retrieval-augmented generation. A bilingual corpus of 8,664 research papers was processed using a 110-indicator schema to construct SA-Bench, comprising 4,860 paper-level planning instances. A QwQ-32B model was adapted through low-rank supervised fine-tuning and combined with case retrieval for budget-conditioned planning. Evidence extraction achieved an F1-score of 0.83 on 300 expert-annotated papers. Without retrieval, Wenyao achieved 95.83% accuracy on 936 source-disjoint multiple-choice questions, compared with 87.93% for the strongest general-purpose baseline; removing explanatory supervision reduced accuracy to 89.42%. Matched-evidence comparisons across 69 region-budget cases supported complementary contributions from adaptation and retrieval. In a blind assessment by 31 experts, Wenyao with retrieval obtained the highest mean scores for objectives and projected outcomes, whereas GPT-5 scored highest for cost estimates. These findings support literature-informed reclamation planning with professional review, while ongoing field monitoring will assess soil and crop responses.
Bo Gou, Jicheng Zhang, Jianlong Xiong, Tao He, Hai Wu, Bentian Liu, Yijiao Wang, Yu Zhang 等 13 位作者
Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest openly released echocardiography video dataset. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The STFM leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STFM achieves competitive performance and effectiveness compared with diverse video classification architectures, including two-dimensional and three-dimensional convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and Transformers. The code is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/bgx666/EV9V and the EV9V dataset is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.
Kaicheng Zhang, Wen Ge, Lei Jiang, Weixin Yang, Jordan Langham-Lopez, Jialin Yu, Lukasz Szpruch, Hao Ni
Although large language model agents are increasingly applied to quantitative-finance workflows, their evaluation remains fragmented across isolated tasks, while the financial relevance of benchmark tasks is often overlooked. Yet financial workflows are inherently multi-stage, spanning interdependent tasks such as forecasting, strategy construction, risk management, and trading. Existing platforms typically focus on a single task, and can therefore overstate agent competence and fail to reveal weaknesses in generalization, real-market interaction, and financially meaningful decision-making. We introduce OpenFinGym, a unified gym environment for quantitative-finance agent development that covers forecasting, market generation, real-time trading, and fraud detection under a single execution and verification interface. OpenFinGym additionally provides an automated task-construction pipeline that turns quantitative finance publications into executable task packages; a containerised runtime with a host-side verifier service that supports scalable agent rollouts and prevents runtime train-test leakage; a paper trading engine with a low-latency data-stream design; deferred-resolution support for long-horizon and event-market forecasts; and integration for SFT and RL post-training.
Offline reinforcement learning is fundamentally limited by the coverage of the available data, while collecting additional trajectories through online exploration may be costly, unsafe, or infeasible. We study whether this limitation can be overcome without directly interacting with the underlying environment. Motivated by practical settings such as collaborator-mediated simulation, where a collaborator can provide information complementary to the offline data, we introduce query-based collaborative reinforcement learning to study how to acquire this information efficiently. The learner starts with a fixed offline dataset and adaptively queries state-time pairs; the collaborator samples an action according to a fixed, possibly suboptimal policy, and the simulator returns the corresponding reward and next state. For finite-horizon tabular problems, we derive an instance-dependent information-theoretic lower bound on the additional queries required to identify an $ε$-optimal policy and develop a local quadratic approximation. Guided by this characterization, we develop an adaptive query-allocation algorithm whose query complexity nearly matches the local benchmark under suitable conditions. Experiments on multiple synthetic and semi-synthetic environments demonstrate the empirical efficiency of the proposed method.
Fight World Model: Customizable Combat through Visual Interaction Proxies
Jiahua Li, Zixu John, Tom Zhong, Fuping Wu, Tianhao Xu, Ruicheng Zhang, Jun Zhou, Zunnan Xu
AI 速览：FWM 将规则驱动的战斗执行与视频渲染分离，用可执行引擎和确定性编译器生成交互代理，从而在无需重训渲染器的情况下支持可定制战斗规则与角色外观。
A playable, programmable game world must maintain persistent state, enforce executable rules, and support extensible gameplay mechanics. Existing video world models can generate plausible combat, yet struggle to keep hit reactions and health updates consistent with game rules. We introduce Fight World Model (FWM), which separates rule-governed combat execution from video rendering. An executable engine maintains state and resolves interactions. A deterministic compiler encodes these outcomes and attempted actions in a spatially and temporally aligned interaction proxy. The proxy aligns action and skill windows, brief hit reactions, and persistent health by fighter identity and timing. These cues can be controlled separately to render interactions under modified rules. Identity-bound references preserve character appearance across side switches. We train FWM on FightWorld Corpus, spanning 52 skill effects, 187 character-appearance variants, and 15 arenas. Without retraining the renderer, FWM supports damage scaling, limited-hit immunity, lifesteal, and multi-stage skill mechanisms beyond the native game. It also allows character and arena customization. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FWM, which outperforms existing game world models in action fidelity, hit reactions, health-state consistency, and character appearance preservation. Our project is available at https://fight-world-model.github.io.
Yuqiang Lin, Kehua Chen, Sam Lockyer, Arjun Yadav, Mingxuan Sui, Shucheng Zhang, Yan Shi, Bingzhang Wang 等 15 位作者
Traffic Anomaly Understanding (TAU) is important for traffic safety in Intelligent Transportation Systems. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong capabilities in video understanding. However, progress on TAU remains limited due to the lack of benchmarks and task-specific methodologies. To address this limitation, we introduce Roundabout-TAU, a dataset constructed from real-world roundabout videos collected in collaboration with the City of Carmel, Indiana. The dataset contains 342 clips and is annotated with more than 2,000 question-answer pairs covering multiple aspects of traffic anomaly understanding. Building on this benchmark, we propose TAU-R1, a two-layer vision-language framework for TAU. The first layer is a lightweight anomaly classifier that performs coarse anomaly categorisation, while the second layer is a larger anomaly reasoner that generates detailed event summaries. To improve task-specific reasoning, we introduce a two-stage training strategy consisting of decomposed-QA-enhanced supervised fine-tuning followed by TAU-GRPO, a GRPO-based post-training method with TAU-specific reward functions. Experimental results show that TAU-R1 achieves strong performance on both anomaly classification and reasoning tasks while maintaining deployment efficiency. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/siri-rouser/TAU-R1
Zijuan Zhao, Zheren Fu, Hou Xia, Licheng Zhang, Yi Liu, Zhendong Mao
Assessing whether multimodal content aligns with macro-societal values, such as peace, justice, and freedom, has become an increasingly urgent challenge. Existing frameworks are largely confined to safety-oriented taxonomies, text-only psychometric probes, or single-label classification. Therefore, we propose MAVEN, a hierarchical framework for macro-societal value evaluation of multimodal content, grounded in international human-rights instruments and cultural value theory. MAVEN organizes values into 6 primary dimensions and 72 secondary indicators, supporting multi-level quantitative scoring. Building on MAVEN, we construct a human-verified multimodal benchmark and a soft-match metric to evaluate VLMs' assessments across value dimensions. For evaluator optimization, we propose a span-adaptive variant of multi-level preference optimization for evaluator distillation, together with a training-free multi-role consensus strategy at inference time. We evaluate existing open- and closed-source VLMs on our benchmark, revealing shared tendencies and clear differences in macro-societal value judgments. Experiments show that our compact 2B evaluator matches its 8B counterpart in the same family and approaches frontier closed-source VLMs, offering a practical path toward scalable macro-societal value evaluation. Our SA-MDPO implementation and MacroValue-Bench are available at https://github.com/zzzzzzzzjj/MAVEN.
Although Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) are predominant in Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI), they are still limited by a uniform design philosophy. The existing approaches stack high-complexity priors with the same structure repeatedly, neglecting the fact that the optimization paths gradually converge to a nearly static state. As a consequence, representation stagnation occurs, and much computational cost is wasted on small feature updates. To solve this inefficiency, we propose Differential Unfolding (DU), a heterogeneous framework that substitutes repeated work with a periodic schedule of heavy and lightweight stages. The core of DU is the Differential Evolutionary Framework (DEF), which divides the unfolding procedure into two complementary roles: structural anchoring and differential evolution. In this method, high-parameter general stages are used sparsely to form high-fidelity feature foundations. On the other hand, lightweight differential stages use a Differential Representation Prior (DRP) to pass on and refine these foundational features by a differential mechanism. By integrating Differential Representation Attention (DRA) for evolving attention maps and a Differential Modulated FFN (DM-FFN) for feature rectification, DRP effectively models cross-stage variations with minimal overhead. By concentrating high-capacity computation on the sparsely-scheduled general stages and delegating incremental refinement to the lightweight differential stages, DU achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments show that DU-9stg achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality, while DU-5stg surpasses all compared methods with the fewest parameters and FLOPs; compared with the unfolding method DADUN, DU-9stg needs about half the parameters and a quarter of the FLOPs. Code: https://github.com/Muyuan-Zhang/DU
Few-shot voice cloning makes it cheap to produce daily Japanese financial commentary with several synthetic speakers, but kanji words with more than one reading, such as the word for "market" (shijo vs. ichiba) or "overall trend" (taisei vs. oze), are still misread. A common quality gate transcribes each synthesized sentence with automatic speech recognition (ASR), converts both the input and the transcript to kana, and regenerates on mismatch. We show that this gate is unreliable in both directions: when the audio contains a misreading, the ASR language model frequently writes the expected kanji back, hiding the error, and when the audio is correct, ordinary recognition errors trigger needless regeneration. We propose a reading-level check that scores the expected reading and its confusable alternatives with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) hiragana recognizer and flags a word when an alternative explains the audio better. On 540 utterances from three voice-cloned production voices covering 30 financial terms, with misreadings injected under controlled conditions, the transcript-based gate detected 78.9% of misreadings at a 44.4% false-alarm rate, whereas the proposed check detected 91.7% at 5.0% (AUC 0.990). On natural kanji input, it caught a front-end error that the transcript-based gate missed for one voice, and reduced regeneration requests from 38.9% to 6.1% of sentences.
Pneumonia changes across respiration, inflammation, and organ function, while the measurements that describe it arrive at different times and are often incomplete. We introduce PULMOWORLD, a world model for longitudinal pneumonia dynamics that connects asynchronous state estimation, recursive simulation, and evidence-constrained planning. History-aware filtering separates state propagation from observation-driven correction, so a measurement updates the shared belief only when it is observed. That belief supports recursive forecasts of clinical values and modality representations, and summaries of future prognosis. Cap-MBRL searches imagined continuations inside an authorized action set and replaces a frozen fallback only when a candidate meets the risk budget and a predicted-cost margin. On the pneumonia cohort MASS, recursive forecasts are competitive with task-trained sequence models, and simulated future states retain prognostic information. Trained separately on public MIMIC-IV-CXR chest radiographs and clinical trajectories, this model improves prognostic discrimination over latest-value fusion in development and is competitive on long-horizon error on the locked pneumonia panel. In five known-mechanism MASS-Syn environments, Cap-MBRL lowers selection regret relative to direct fallback execution.
Xinyuan Li, Matthew Zahr, Panos Stinis, Zecheng Zhang
Multi-fidelity learning uses low-fidelity information (coarse-scale PDE models) together with limited high-fidelity data (fine-scale solutions) to obtain high-accuracy PDE solutions. It is a data-driven approach to downscale reduced-order models to solve PDEs efficiently and accurately. Standard multi-fidelity learning focuses on one operator or PDE; given a new PDE, retraining using additional coarse-fine solution pairs may be required, which is costly. In this work, we propose an in-context multi-fidelity learning framework for learning multiple multi-fidelity operators with one shared model. The model is trained using paired low- and high-fidelity examples as demonstrations from multiple operators, together with a new coarse-scale solution query, to predict the corresponding fine-scale solution. Once trained, given a new PDE operator, a few (fewer than five) coarse-fine demonstration pairs, and a low-cost coarse query, the model predicts the corresponding fine-scale solution without fine-tuning. When the target operator appears in the training dataset but has a different prediction goal, such as predicting beyond the training time interval, no additional demonstrations are needed. Instead, the model uses training coarse-fine pairs from that PDE and information from other training operators. Testing then only requires generating a low-cost coarse-scale solution query, without fine-tuning. Notably, our smallest model contains only 255,364 trainable parameters, corresponding to approximately 456 parameters per training operator for 560 operators.
While data curation is widely credited with improving large language model training, a basic question remains unresolved: does curation expand what a model can ultimately learn, or merely reach the same solution faster? In this paper, we formalize this distinction between advancement (improving the attainable performance) and acceleration (reaching the same performance with less data). Through an analytic characterization and real-world LLM experiments, we show that advancement requires a correctable train-target gap. When the baseline training and target objectives coincide, no curation policy improves the endpoint, although curation may still accelerate training. This reframes advancement as a property of the curation task rather than the curation method. Under a common gap-centric view of data mixture and selection, we operationalize this condition as the $Δ$-test, an observable discrepancy between the uncurated baseline's training and target losses that is computable prior to expensive curation. Across extensive experiments, an appreciably nonzero $Δ$ predicts persistent gains, whereas gains near $Δ=0$ tend to diminish as the training budget grows. Beyond individual methods, our findings recenter data curation on the task itself and point to target-set construction as a promising direction for shaping what curation can achieve.
Junxing Hu, Ai Han, Haolan Zhan, Pu Wei, Zhiqian Zhang, Yuhang Guo, Jiawei Lu, Zhen Chen 等 11 位作者
Long-horizon agentic systems become long-context systems by accumulation rather than through a single long document, since every step reassembles a prompt from role instructions, tool and sub-agent descriptions, recalled memories, dialogue history, and previous tool outputs, separately for every agent. This paper studies how such accumulated context can be trained, evaluated, and managed in hierarchical multi-agent assistants. We present HiMA-Ecom, a hierarchical multi-agent benchmark for e-commerce assistants with 22.8K instances, of which 17.7K carry memory entries in context, pairing agent-specific supervised fine-tuning data with system-level supervision for end-to-end multi-agent reinforcement learning. Building upon it, HiMA-R1 keeps the context budget of a trajectory under control through Variance-Reduction Group Relative Policy Optimization (VR-GRPO), which samples along an initial trajectory so that sampling cost grows additively with trajectory length and updates the agents with the largest reward variance, together with an efficiency reward on trajectory length and a memory evolution mechanism that repurposes GRPO rewards as cost-free signals for what stays in context. Agents built upon 3B and 7B open-source models match DeepSeek-R1 and surpass DeepSeek-V3 by 6.0 points on average, while reward-driven memory reduces the update steps needed for convergence by roughly 55%.
Chengbo Yuan, Zicheng Zhang, Mingjie Zhou, Wendi Chen, Yi Wang, Zhuoyang Liu, Dantong Niu, Shuo Wang 等 17 位作者
Despite the success of vision-based generalist robotic policies, existing tactile-based policies remain tied to fixed embodiments and sensor setups. This is because tactile signals are highly heterogeneous across hardware, making cross-sensor generalization difficult. We present FTP-1,the first generalist foundation tactile policy pretrained to acquire transferable tactile manipulation abilities across diverse sensors and embodiments. FTP-1 supports varied tactile inputs, including image-, array-, and state-based signals, by using heterogeneous encoders to project them into unified morphology-aware latent tokens that are jointly modeled by a shared tactile Transformer expert. Pretrained on around 3,000 hours of tactile manipulation data aggregated from 26 data sources, spanning human and robot demonstrations across 21 sensors, FTP-1 learns tactile skills that transfer beyond the sensors seen during pretraining. Across downstream finetuning experiments spanning 5 hardware configurations, FTP-1 improves contact-rich manipulation on seen sensor setups by +17.2% and, surprisingly, transfers to two previously unseen tactile-sensor setups, achieving a +31% gain in success rate. FTP-1 establishes the first unified foundation baseline for tactile manipulation, providing future tactile policies with a shared model-level starting point. Pretrained models, datasets, training code and more visualization at https://ftp1-policy.github.io.
Video models answer from sampled frames and may miss the decisive moment. A common remedy is to commit to an answer, re-examine the video, and confirm or revise it, a loop now mainly learned with reinforcement learning (RL). We find that RL erodes the initial answer, a phenomenon we term confidence erosion, where confidence means the label-verified reliability of the initial answer instead of self-reported certainty: because errors can be repaired later, a correct initial answer earns less reward, and the initial answer stalls even as the final answer's gain over it rises. We propose the principle confident first, reflective second: the initial answer must stay reliable on its own, above a floor set by a reference policy, and reflection may only add to it. Our method, CoFire, implements this principle with one mechanism for each erosion channel: reward incentives, parameter drift, and gradient interference. CoFire reaches 67.0% mean accuracy on Video-MME, MLVU, and LongVideoBench, 1.7 points above the strongest compared 7B method, and improves initial-answer and final accuracy over outcome-reward RL by 4.1 and 3.7 points on average: a stronger initial answer carries through to a stronger final one.
Jiacheng Zhang, Xueyi Zhang, Xin Lu, Siqi Cai, Haizhou Li
Electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used in clinical assessment, brain-computer interfaces, and cognitive-state analysis, yet EEG modeling remains fragmented across task paradigms. Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) provide a promising interface for flexible multimodal reasoning, but their ability to understand EEG inputs remains limited. In this work, we propose OneEEG, a unified EEG-MLLM framework for multi-task EEG understanding. By training on our curated OneEEG-Instruct, a multi-task EEG instruction-tuning dataset, OneEEG jointly models numerical EEG representations and visual EEG representations, and introduces a task-aware Mixture of Projectors (MoP) to align heterogeneous EEG features across different task families with the LLM embedding space. We further establish OneEEG-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating current MLLMs and our method on multi-task EEG understanding. Experiments show that existing MLLMs have limited ability to interpret EEG inputs, while OneEEG achieves stronger performance by integrating numerical and visual EEG representations with task-aware EEG-to-LLM projection. Extensive ablations and analyses further reveal the effects of visual EEG renderings, MoP variants, router behavior, and feature dispersion across EEG tasks.
Junxing Hu, Zicheng Zhang, Zhiqian Zhang, Ai Han, Yifeng Zhang, Pengzhang Liu, Ling Li
Reasoning models trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) now produce chains of thought thousands of tokens long, and recent studies reveal that such training is prone to policy collapse. Entropy regularization is the standard remedy, but it works by pushing probability mass away from the few tokens that carry it and toward the vast low-probability tail of the vocabulary, and it applies this force once for every token of the reasoning trace. This puts the bonus in direct conflict with the entropy decay that convergence requires, and makes its coefficient difficult to set in the long-trace regime. To resolve this tension, we propose Info-GRPO, an information-theoretic framework that cultivates correlation between the policy and a latent prior. Rather than raising entropy everywhere, Info-GRPO builds on the mutual information between a latent variable and the trajectory it induces: augmenting prompts with latent seeds during training lets the model explore diverse policies correlated with the prior, while the seed-conditioned entropy is guided toward convergence. Diversity is therefore carried across whole reasoning traces rather than by per-token randomness, and exploration no longer fights entropy reduction. Experiments show that Info-GRPO outperforms vanilla GRPO and entropy-regularized GRPO across diverse reasoning benchmarks. On AIME24, it improves $Avg@8$ over GRPO by 3.75%, 1.66%, 4.16%, and 4.17% on four backbones, and it reaches the same majority-vote accuracy with $8\times$ fewer samples. Code and models will be publicly released.
Xiaocheng Zhang Meituan, Xi Wang, Yifei Lu Qiantang Credit, Jianing Wang, Zhuangzhuang Ye, Mengjiao Bao Meituan, Peng Yan Meituan, Xiaohong Su
With the surge of online misinformation, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reasoning Large Language Models (RLMs) serving as Automatic Fact-Checking (AFC) systems have emerged as a prominent paradigm for reliable, explainable verification. However, our empirical study reveals that this paradigm faces a critical risk asymmetry challenge when deployed in real-world under resource-constrained environments. While Hotspot Perception Ability (HPA), the capacity to dynamically allocate reasoning resources based on social impact, is essential to mitigate this risk, existing benchmarks lack the social metadata and evaluation framework to meet this urgent evaluation needs, thereby hindering the advancement of these AFC systems. To bridge this gap, we introduce TrendFact, the first benchmark capable of evaluating HPA and three fact-checking tasks. It consists of 7,643 curated samples sourced from trending platforms and professional datasets, with an evidence library containing 366,634 entries. To enable HPA assessment, we propose two novel metrics: the Explanation Consistency Score (ECS) to evaluate the reliability of verification reasoning, and the Hotspot Claim Perception Index (HCPI) to quantify the overall HPA of AFC systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that existing AFC systems exhibit limited performance on TrendFact. Furthermore, our proposed FactISR framework effectively enhances HPA and computational efficiency for RLM-driven 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
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capability across diverse tasks. However, their deployment in long-context scenarios is hindered by two challenges: computational inefficiency and redundant information. We propose RAM (Read As HuMan), a context compression framework that adopts an adaptive hybrid reading strategy, to address these challenges. Inspired by human reading behavior (i.e., close reading important content while skimming less relevant content), RAM partitions the context into segments and encodes them with the input query in parallel. High-relevance segments are fully retained (close reading), while low-relevance ones are query-guided compressed into compact summary vectors (skimming). Both explicit textual segments and implicit summary vectors are concatenated and fed into decoder to achieve both superior performance and natural language format interpretability. To refine the decision boundary between close reading and skimming, we further introduce a contrastive learning objective based on positive and negative query–segment pairs. Experiments demonstrate that RAM outperforms existing baselines on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks across two backbones, while delivering up to a 12x end-to-end speedup on long inputs (average length 16K; maximum length 32K).
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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
Jiwei Tang, Zhicheng Zhang, Shunlong Wu, Jingheng Ye Northeastern University, Lichen Bai, Zitai Wang, Tingwei Lu, Lin Hai Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University 等 11 位作者
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, in long-context scenarios, they face two challenges: high computational cost and information redundancy. To address these challenges, we propose GMSA, an encoder-decoder context compression framework that generates a compact sequence of soft tokens for downstream tasks. GMSA introduces Group Merging to achieve more uniform aggregation, mitigating semantic dominance during autoencoder pretraining, and Layer Semantic Alignment (LSA) to bridge the semantic gap between high-level abstract semantics and low-level input semantics. We first pretrain GMSA as an autoencoder and then fine-tune it for downstream tasks. Experiments demonstrate that GMSA improves context reconstruction compared to existing soft prompt compression paradigm and outperforms baselines on multiple long-context question answering and summarization benchmarks across two backbone models, while maintaining low end-to-end latency.
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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
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to manage and acquire economic resources remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce Market-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the capabilities of LLMs in economically-relevant tasks through economic and trade competition. Specifically, we construct a configurable multi-agent supply chain economic model where LLMs act as retailer agents responsible for procuring and retailing merchandise. In the procurement stage, LLMs bid for limited inventory in budget-constrained auctions. In the retail stage, LLMs set retail prices, generate marketing slogans, and provide them to buyers through a role-based attention mechanism for purchase. Market-Bench logs complete trajectories of bids, prices, slogans, sales, and balance-sheet states, enabling automatic evaluation with economic, operational, and semantic metrics. Benchmarking on 20 open- and closed-source LLM agents reveals significant performance disparities and winner-take-most phenomenon, i.e., only a small subset of LLM retailers can consistently achieve capital appreciation, while many hover around the break-even point despite similar semantic matching scores. Market-Bench provides a reproducible testbed for studying how LLMs interact in competitive markets.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Shuyu Zhang, Yujie Liu Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, Xinru Wang University of Sydney, Cheng Zhang Tianjin University of Finance & Economics, Yanmin Zhu Shanghai Jiaotong University, Bin Li Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Traditional task-oriented dialog systems are unable to evolve from ongoing interactions or adapt to new domains after deployment, that is a critical limitation in real-world dynamic environments. Continual learning approaches depend on episodic retraining with human-curated data, failing to achieve autonomy lifelong improvement. While evolutionary computation and LLM driven self-improvement offer promising mechanisms for dialog optimization, they lack a unified framework for holistic, iterative strategy refinement. To bridge this gap, we propose DarwinTOD, a lifelong self-evolving dialog framework that systematically integrates these two paradigms, enabling continuous strategy optimization from a zero-shot base without task-specific fine-tuning. DarwinTOD maintains an Evolvable Strategy Bank and operates through a dual-loop process: online multi-agent dialog execution with peer critique, and offline structured evolutionary operations that refine the strategy bank using accumulated feedback. This closed-loop design enables autonomous continuous improvement without human intervention. Extensive experiments show that DarwinTOD surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and exhibits continuous performance gains throughout evolution. Our work provides a novel framework for building dialog systems with lifelong self-evolution capabilities.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表