AI 速览：提出上下文感知的自回归图像生成框架，让模型依据全局上下文与当前局部信息动态决定下一个 token 的位置，而非固定或随机顺序。
Autoregressive image generation has recently emerged as a competitive visual generation paradigm, yet its generation order is often predefined or heuristic, such as next-patch prediction, random-order prediction, or one-step generation for specific scales. We observe that these strategies can cause models to overlook important structural dependencies in images, thereby limiting both structural robustness and reasoning capability. In this work, we propose a context-aware autoregressive generation framework, where the model dynamically determines the next token location based on global context and current local information. Rather than following a fixed or random order, our method allows the generation process to adapt to image structure and semantic dependencies. Extensive experiments show that context-aware generation significantly improves structural robustness across different image AR paradigms, including masked autoregressive and scale-wise autoregressive models. Beyond quantitative improvements, we further observe emerging reasoning properties: the model can better understand complex semantic instructions and generate images that more faithfully follow the given guidance. These findings suggest that generation order is a critical yet underexplored factor in image autoregressive modeling, and that context-aware decoding can unlock stronger reasoning-aware visual generation capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/Hpesojyjx/Saccades-AR.
Andrey Ignatov, Georgy Perevozchikov, Radu Timofte, Dong Zhang, Zhao Ran, Yang Zhang, Xiaochen Li, Shichang Ju 等 24 位作者
On-device RGB photo enhancement is a popular task that is needed for quality improvement of photos captured with mobile devices as well as for retouching of images acquired through other sources. This creates a need for efficient deep learning models for this problem that are not only performant but can also be deployed on constrained mobile hardware. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose participants to design fast solutions that can perform comprehensive enhancement of RGB photos while running on popular smartphone GPUs from Qualcomm and Arm. For this, the participants were provided with a large-scale DPED dataset consisting of RGB image pairs captured with an old iPhone 3GS smartphone and a professional Canon 70D DSLR camera. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Dimensity 9500 chipsets with the Adreno and Mali GPUs, respectively. Top solutions proposed in this challenge are able to enhance Full HD resolution RGB images on both platforms under 300 milliseconds. A comprehensive description of the models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.
Junfeng Wang, Jiawei Liu, Yongchao Xu, Tao Jiang, Jiangbo Ai, Jin Zhang, Chong Wang, Qixing Zhang
Complex visual question answering often requires vision-language models to think with images, i.e., actively acquire local visual evidence by zooming into informative regions of high-resolution images. Our error analysis shows that many failures in this setting originate from incorrect observation actions, where the model fails to localize key regions or obtain crops that contain sufficient evidence for answering. We further observe that bounding-box tokens exhibit substantially higher generation entropy than ordinary language tokens, indicating high uncertainty when the model decides where to look. However, existing reinforcement learning methods based on final-answer rewards provide only trajectory-level feedback, making it difficult to assign precise credit to the observation actions. We propose Observation Policy Optimization (OPO), an RL algorithm for optimizing observation actions in tool-augmented thinking with images. OPO consists of two core modules. First, Uncertainty-Guided Observation Branching (UOB) treats each image zoom-in tool call as an observation event and selectively branches at high-uncertainty, low-redundancy events during rollout, enabling efficient exploration of alternative cropping decisions and their resulting visual evidence. Second, Evidence-Localized Advantage Attribution (ELAA) compares sibling branches using local evidence-sufficiency rewards and assigns credit only to the corresponding observation-action tokens. By decoupling observation-action optimization from trajectory-level outcome supervision, OPO improves visual evidence acquisition and further enhances visual reasoning performance. Experiments show that OPO consistently improves Qwen3-VL models across scales and achieves competitive performance against larger models and tool-augmented baselines. Code is publicly available.
Jinwu Hu, Langyu Bian, Jian Sun, Dongjin Yang, Chao Shuai, Yufeng Wang, Kai Zhou, Bin Xiao 等 11 位作者
Open-set test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to adapt source-trained models to unlabeled test streams where covariate-shifted in-distribution (csID) samples and covariate-shifted out-of-distribution (csOOD) samples may coexist. Existing TTA methods are typically designed under a closed-set assumption and therefore lack explicit mechanisms for reliably distinguishing csID from csOOD samples. Consequently, csOOD samples may be mistakenly included in confidence-enhancing adaptation, producing harmful gradients that degrade known-class performance. To address this, we propose Uncertainty-Aware Prototype Learning for Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation (UAPA), a plug-and-play method for reliable open-set adaptation. Specifically, we first introduce Uncertainty-Driven ID/OOD Separation, which combines a classifier-prototype score with a mini-batch-normalized evidence-derived uncertainty score to distinguish csID from csOOD samples. We then propose a Dynamic Prototype Refinement strategy that periodically refines class-specific target prototypes using buffered csID features to progressively follow the estimated class directions. Lastly, we introduce Contrastive Prototype Entropy Adaptation, which applies entropy minimization to csID samples and entropy maximization to csOOD samples, while prototype-level contrastive learning aligns csID features with their corresponding target prototypes and reduces the maximum similarity between csOOD features and known-class prototypes. Empirically, UAPA outperforms the strongest baselines on the CIFAR benchmarks and Tiny-ImageNet-C, improving average OSCR by 2.08 and 1.28 percentage points, respectively.
Dynamic driving scene reconstruction has made remarkable strides in recent years by leveraging generative priors, particularly in the quality of novel trajectory rendering. Nevertheless, a significant gap remains between the generated data and real-world sensor observations, severely hindering further improvements in reconstruction fidelity. In this paper, we present ReconDreamer#, a self-evolving framework that synergizes reconstruction and generation for dynamic driving scenes, which substantially bridges the gap between synthesized novel trajectory data and recorded real-world observations. Within this self-evolving closed-loop framework, the generative and reconstruction models mutually reinforce each other through iterative refinement, ultimately yielding a significant enhancement in the 3D representation capability of the reconstruction model. Additionally, we introduce a geometry-prior-based adaptive ground model to further enhance the rendering quality of the reconstruction model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on Waymo, nuScenes, PandaSet, and EUVS benchmarks. Specifically on Waymo, at a 6-m lateral shift, ReconDreamer# improves NTA-IoU and NTL-IoU by 8.8% and 3.0%, respectively, and reduces FID by 15.1% relative to ReconDreamer++.
Xuwei Liu, Zhimin Zhang, Xiaoguang Hu, Zhongwei Liu, Yuanhui Sun, Jun Huo, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Machine learning supports materials design, atomistic simulation and experimental characterization, yet models and workflows remain fragmented. We present PaddleMaterials, an open-source framework integrating heterogeneous materials-learning tasks while preserving task-specific representations and scientific semantics. It unifies data processing, training, evaluation, pretrained-model management and workflows across six task classes: property prediction, structure generation, machine-learning interatomic potentials, electronic-structure fields, spectrum elucidation and microscopy image processing. Task interfaces record physical quantities, units, aggregation conventions and references, making cross-task composition verifiable. A shared compiler backend enables switching from dynamic-graph to compiled execution through one setting, using graph optimization, operator fusion and hardware-targeted code generation without changing model definitions. Across 65 model instances in 11 groups, compiled execution accelerated every instance in eight groups, with group median speedups of 11%-224% and group maximum speedups of 11%-336%. Case studies on LiMnO2 and toluene link structure generation or spectrum elucidation, interatomic-potential relaxation, property prediction and electron-density prediction, using same-geometry density functional theory (DFT) calculations as references. For LiMnO2, predicted formation energies for generated and relaxed structures differed from same-geometry PBE+U references by at most 7 meV per atom, while the computational cost of model steps was less than one-twentieth of a DFT single-point calculation. PaddleMaterials extends unified materials workflows beyond conventional property, potential and structure-generation tasks while supporting verifiable cross-task operations and compiled execution.
AI 速览：作者提出基于大语言模型的智能体 ClinGeX，通过检索与依赖感知编排 105 个可执行技能来辅助临床基因组解读，并在基准与人类-AI 协作研究中报告了优于对照的表现。
Clinical genomic analysis requires experts to integrate evolving guidelines, databases, and computational evidence. As sequencing has become increasingly accessible, this complex and labor-intensive process has become a major bottleneck to the timely use of genomic information in clinical decision-making. To fill this gap, we developed ClinGeX, a large-language-model agent that composes 105 curated executable skills through task-specific retrieval and dependency-aware orchestration. On 223 temporally held-out benchmark cases, ClinGeX achieved 71.7\% macro-averaged task-level concordance with expert reference classifications, compared with 45.7\% for the strongest comparator. In a three-condition, counterbalanced human-AI collaboration study, 45 clinical genomic professionals assessed 135 clinically derived cases under routine (no AI assistance), DeepSeek-assisted and ClinGeX-assisted conditions. ClinGeX assistance increased raw case-level concordance across criterion-level variant analysis, genomic interpretation in rare disease and molecular oncology decision-making (51.1\%, 57.8\%, 64.4\% versus 15.6\%, 31.1\%, 20.0\% in comparator conditions) and reduced reported interpretation time in all scenarios. During an exploratory one-month real-world non-interventional assessment, 11 experienced professionals submitted feedback on 96 self-selected analysis episodes and reported frequent conclusion adoption and time savings. These findings support executable domain skills as a promising approach to augment specialist genomic interpretation.
Shuijin Lin, Shaozhen Yan, Tuo Liu, Haifeng Wang, Chunfeng Lian, Jie Lu, Jianhua Ma, Lin Xie
The biological definition of Alzheimer's disease (AD) relies on multi-modal neuroimaging, yet the clinical utility of positron emission tomography (PET) is limited by cost and radiation exposure, hindering early screening at preclinical or prodromal stages. While generative models offer a promising alternative by synthesizing PET from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), achieving subject-specific precision remains a primary challenge. Here, we introduce DIReCT$++$, a Domain-Informed ReCTified flow model for synthesizing multi-tracer PET from MRI combined with fundamental clinical information. Our approach integrates a 3D rectified flow architecture to capture complex cross-modal and cross-tracer relationships with a domain-adapted vision-language model (BiomedCLIP) that provides text-guided, personalized generation using clinical scores and imaging knowledge. Extensive evaluations on multi-center datasets demonstrate that DIReCT$++$ not only produces synthetic PET images ($^{18}$F-AV-45 and $^{18}$F-FDG) of superior fidelity and generalizability but also accurately recapitulates disease-specific patterns. Crucially, combining these synthesized PET images with MRI enables precise personalized stratification of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), advancing a scalable, data-efficient tool for the early diagnosis and prognostic prediction of AD. The source code will be released on https://github.com/ladderlab-xjtu/DIReCT-PLUS.
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.
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems hold immense potential for automating complex workflows in materials discovery and design, but extending these capabilities to domain-intensive mechanistic studies remains challenging. General grain boundaries (GBs) exemplify this challenge, as their structural complexity complicates experimental characterization and atomistic modeling. Here, we present GBClaw, an agentic AI framework for investigating the structure and deformation of general GBs, which are common in real polycrystals yet remain understudied. By integrating large language models into a modular architecture, GBClaw effectively combines systematic simulations with targeted mechanistic analysis through iterative workflow refinement and dynamic replanning. Applied to 14 general asymmetric tilt GBs in nickel, the framework characterized interfacial defect structures and deformation modes across these incommensurate boundaries. It established a general approach to identify previously unobserved, widely spaced secondary GB misfit dislocations (SGBMDs) alongside closely spaced primary GB misfit dislocations (PGBMDs) in simulated atomic configurations and experimental images. Comparisons of GB sliding with and without SGBMDs revealed substantial differences in shear strength, underscoring the critical role of misfit-dislocation hierarchies in sliding resistance. Researcher-guided follow-up calculations further elucidated the structural origins of shear asymmetry and an anomalous shear response. This work demonstrates that combining agentic AI with domain expertise bridges high-throughput computational screening and deep mechanistic discovery at complex material interfaces.
Yin Fang, Qiao Jin, Shubo Tian, Lauren He, Maya Geer, Noor Naffakh, Ryan Huu-Tuan Nguyen, Zifeng Wang 等 27 位作者
Clinical trials are essential for evidence-based medicine and drug development, but many fail because of insufficient patient enrollment. Although there is growing interest in using AI to support patient recruitment, existing systems largely perform eligibility assessment alone and have rarely been evaluated in real-world workflows. Here we present TrialGPT 2.0, an AI-assisted clinical trial recommendation system improved for responsible real-world deployment. Rather than asking only whether a patient may qualify, the system assesses which trials warrant further consideration given the patient's current clinical needs and local workflow priorities, and provides structured, inspectable explanations for expert review. Importantly, we evaluated TrialGPT 2.0 retrospectively and prospectively across government research, patient-advocacy, academic medical center, and community-based radiation-oncology settings. In retrospective multicenter cohorts comprising 288 cases, TrialGPT 2.0 retrieved at least one clinician-recommended trial in its top 10 recommendations for approximately 91% of cases while reducing clinician screening time by 55.0%. In a six-month prospective evaluation embedded in an active precision oncology tumor board, TrialGPT 2.0 contributed additional trial opportunities missed by the routine workflow, increasing the number of patient cases with at least one final trial recommendation by 90.9%. To support scientific reproducibility, we also developed NIH-TrialBench, a clinician-authored benchmark comprising 126 diverse synthetic patient vignettes and matching scenarios from 11 NIH Institutes and Centers. Together, these findings support the value of AI to assist clinical trial matching by improving clinician efficiency and identifying frequently overlooked trial opportunities, ultimately helping to expand and accelerate accrual to cancer trials.
Wenjie Qiu, Hepei Li, Jianfeng Wang, Jun Zhang, Yue-Jiao Gong
Cooperative Coevolution (CC) and Non-Decomposition Algorithms (NDAs) are two primary approaches for large-scale global optimization (LSGO). Although both have achieved success, they exhibit markedly different performance across problem types and each faces approach-specific limitations, leaving the question of "when to use CC" unresolved. We address this gap with WCC, a novel learning-based framework that dynamically decides when to deploy CC in LSGO. WCC employs a streamlined design for efficient adaptive learning. We formulate the decision as a Markov decision process, designing a targeted feature set, a robust reward, and a tailored network architecture to provide the agent with rich information about the problem state and optimization progress. Our auto-regressive policy enables WCC to perform fine-grained, dynamic switching between CC and NDAs while conditionally allocating the computational budget without expert specifications. WCC shows strong competitiveness and superior generalization across problems, optimization horizons, and baseline optimizers. It realizes a "train-once and reuse" paradigm under a low budget, significantly curbing LSGO cost. Additionally, in-depth analyses yield insights not captured by existing theory, offering practical guidance on when and how to effectively deploy CC.
Continual learning requires large language models to acquire new knowledge and capabilities while retaining what they have learned. Fine-tuning and replay support acquisition and retention, but deciding whether incoming examples need supervision and which historical examples to revisit remains a challenge. We propose Compatibility-Aware Memory Replay (CAMR), an adaptive framework that jointly controls current-example supervision and historical replay. CAMR combines compatibility checks with a learned memory gate to guide an online policy over three actions: learning incoming examples with general replay, jointly reinforcing compatible related examples, and skipping direct supervision of verified mastered duplicates. The policy learns from acquisition, retention, and training-cost feedback under a bounded per-arrival replay budget. We evaluate CAMR with Qwen3-8B-Base on continual factual updating and cross-task and cross-domain learning. On WikiBigEdit, CAMR consistently leads evaluated methods in Original Match from 3K to 100K facts, reaching 93.66% after just 3K facts and surpassing Full-history Replay (LoRA) after 100K facts. It also achieves the highest final scores on all four selected TRACE tasks and maintains or improves earlier-task performance relative to post-acquisition levels in a sequence spanning financial question answering, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and summarization.
Large language models increasingly act through code, modifying repositories, executing programs, and interacting with services in agent form. Their actions introduce risks that cannot be assessed from generated responses alone. Safety evaluation must verify actual consequences, distinguish harm avoidance from task incapability, and cover realistic workflows. We introduce V$^3$AST-Bench, a benchmark for Verifiable results, Valid interpretation, and Versatile risk coverage of Agent Safety. It comprises 212 risk tasks spanning 18 categories. Dedicated runtime environments verify harm and task outcomes through executable checks over states, records, and artifact behavior, while paired capability twin tasks verify workflow competence. Our experiments span 51 combinations of 11 models and five harnesses, spanning 86,496 trials and over 9 billion tokens of model interaction. Results show that V$^3$AST-Bench remains challenging even for frontier coding agents, as Claude Opus 4.8 with Claude Code still causes verified harm on 20.9% of tasks. Across model-harness combinations, agents with comparable competence exhibit markedly different safety outcomes, showing that task capability alone does not guarantee safe execution. More importantly, even explicit recognition of risks does not reliably prevent harmful actions, revealing a critical gap between risk awareness and safe execution. These findings highlight the need to move beyond risk recognition toward enforcing safety throughout execution.
The whole-page reranking integrates retrieval results from multiple modalities and is critical for user experience of search engines, yet it requires costly large-scale expert annotations due to the complexity of assessing cross-modal relevances. In this paper, we propose SMAR, a novel whole-page reranking framework that converts single-modal rankers into page-level guidance by constructing budget-aware candidates for cross modal annotations and distilling intra-modality preferences to align relevance scales across modalities. Specifically, we use pre-trained single-modal rankers to construct candidate pages for limited cross-modal annotation at the page level. The whole-page reranker is then trained on these samples, enforcing consistency with single-modal preferences to preserve intra-modal ranking quality. Experiments on the Qilin and CrossRank datasets demonstrate that SMAR reduces annotation costs by 70-90% while outperforming the fully-annotated reranking baselines. Further offline and online A/B tests confirm significant gains in both ranking metrics and user experience, validating the effectiveness and practical value of our approach in real-world search scenarios.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Shaoning Sun, Mingzhu Cai, Huang He, Bingjin Chen Baidu, Siqi Bao, Yujiu Yang Tsinghua University, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang Baidu
Language model families exhibit striking disparity in their capacity to benefit from reinforcement learning: under identical training, models like Qwen achieve substantial gains, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. Complementing data-centric approaches, we reveal that this disparity reflects a hidden structural property: distributional clarity in probability space. Through a three-stage analysis—from phenomenon to mechanism to interpretation—we uncover that RL-friendly models exhibit intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in their probability assignments to correct vs. incorrect responses. We quantify this clarity using the Silhouette Coefficient (S) and demonstrate that (1) high S correlates strongly with RL performance; (2) low S is associated with severe logic errors and reasoning instability. To confirm this property, we introduce a Silhouette-Aware Reweighting strategy that prioritizes low-S samples during training. Experiments across six mathematical benchmarks show consistent improvements across all model families, with gains up to 5.9 points on AIME24. Our work establishes distributional clarity as a fundamental, trainable property underlying RL-Friendliness.
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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
Tianwei Lan, Jiaqi Wu, Zeming Liu, Zhaoxin Fan Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Haifeng Wang Baidu, Yuhang Guo
Embodied Action Sequence Planning focuses on the capability of embodied agents to implement action planning via environmental perception. This technology enables diverse intelligent assistance for real-world scenarios such as home and office environments. To address the limitations of existing embodied agents in meeting the requirement for proactivity and achieving joint understanding of visual and audio information, this study investigates the ability of embodied agents to proactively provide assistance through action sequence planning based on joint understanding of vision and audio perception without explicit human instructions. Correspondingly, we propose PEAP, the first multimodal proactive embodied action sequence planning dataset. We evaluate the performance of multiple Large Language Models on the PEAP dataset. The results demonstrate that these models still exhibit significant deficiencies on this task particularly lacking accurate environmental perception capabilities. Furthermore, ablation experiment and replacement experiment further corroborate that the joint understanding of multimodal information can significantly improve the models’ performance on proactive embodied action sequence planning task.
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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
Wen Luo Peking University, Guangyue Peng Peking University, Wei Li, Shaohang Wei Peking University, Feifan Song Peking University, Liang Wang Microsoft Research, Nan Yang Microsoft Research Asia, Xingxing Zhang Microsoft Research Asia 等 11 位作者
Despite their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) frequently generate hallucinations. Previous work shows that their internal states encode rich signals of truthfulness, yet the origins and mechanisms of these signals remain unclear. In this paper, we demonstrate that truthfulness cues arise from two distinct information pathways: (1) a Question-Anchored pathway that depends on question–answer information flow, and (2) an Answer-Anchored pathway that derives self-contained evidence from the generated answer itself. First, we validate and disentangle these pathways through attention knockout and token patching. Afterwards, we uncover notable and intriguing properties of these two mechanisms. Further experiments reveal that (1) the two mechanisms are closely associated with LLM knowledge boundaries; and (2) internal representations are aware of their distinctions. Finally, building on these insightful findings, two applications are proposed to enhance hallucination detection performance. Overall, our work provides new insight into how LLMs internally encode truthfulness, offering directions for more reliable and self-aware generative 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
Siran Liu, Guoxia Wang, Sa Wang, Jinle Zeng Baidu, Haoyang Xie, Siyu Lou Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, Jiabin Yang, Dianhai Yu 等 10 位作者
The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses a critical bottleneck for large language models processing long contexts. While dynamic sparse attention methods offer input-adaptive efficiency, they face fundamental trade-offs: requiring preprocessing, lacking global evaluation, violating query independence, or incurring high computational overhead. We present RRAttention, a novel dynamic sparse attention method that simultaneously achieves all desirable properties through a head round-robin (RR) sampling strategy. By rotating query sampling positions across attention heads within each stride, RRAttention maintains query independence while enabling efficient global pattern discovery with stride-level aggregation. Our method reduces complexity from O(L^2) to O(L^2/S^2) and employs adaptive Top-\tau selection for optimal sparsity. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding (HELMET) and multimodal video comprehension (Video-MME) demonstrate that RRAttention recovers over 99% of full attention performance while computing only half of the attention blocks, achieving 2.4\times speedup at 128K context length and outperforming existing dynamic sparse attention methods. The code is available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleFleet (see ‘Research/RRAttention‘).
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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
Hongcheng Liu, Yuhao Wang, Zhe Chen, Pingjie Wang, Zhiyuan Zhu, Yixuan Hou Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yanfeng Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yu Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Omni Large Language Models (Omni-LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in holistic multi-modal perception, yet they consistently falter in complex scenarios requiring synergistic omni-modal reasoning. Beyond understanding global multimodal context, effective reasoning also hinges on fine-grained cross-modal alignment, especially identifying shared referents across modalities, yet this aspect has been largely overlooked. To bridge this gap, we formalize the challenge as a cross-modal coreference problem, where a model must localize a referent in a source modality and re-identify it in a target modality. Building on this paradigm, we introduce CrossOmni, a dataset comprising nine tasks equipped with human-designed reasoning rationales to evaluate and enhance this capability. Experiments on 13 Omni-LLMs reveal systematic weaknesses in cross-modal coreference, which we attribute to the absence of coreference-aware thinking patterns. To address this, we enhance cross-modal alignment via two strategies: a training-free In-Context Learning method and a training-based SFT+GRPO framework designed to induce such thinking patterns. Both approaches yield substantial performance gains and generalize effectively to collaborative reasoning tasks. Overall, our findings highlight cross-modal coreference as a crucial missing piece for advancing robust omni-modal 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
Jing Jin, Yuhan Song Peking University, Wen Luo Peking University, Houfeng Wang
The generation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models is affected by factors such as the quality and order of input documents, indicating that their ability to utilize documents remains underdeveloped. This ability encompasses not only identifying useful documents from inputs but also minimizing positional bias and filtering irrelevant documents. To achieve this, key challenges include the model’s internal estimation of document importance and positional bias. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the properties of attention weights, examining the impact of factors like aggregation methods, document quality, document position, token type, and so on. Based on our findings, we propose strategies to enhance document utilization from three perspectives: document ranking, placement, and filtering. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms baselines and improves document utilization effectiveness in a training-free manner.
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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
Hongcheng Liu, Pingjie Wang, Yuhao Wang, Siqu Ou Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yanfeng Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yu Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a broad range of benchmarks. However, most existing evaluations focus on passive inference, where models perform step-by-step reasoning under complete information. This setup is misaligned with real-world use, where seeing is not enough. This raises a fundamental question: Can MLLMs actively acquire missing evidence under incomplete information? To bridge this gap, we require the MLLMs to actively acquire missing evidence and iteratively refine decisions under incomplete information, by selecting a target image from a candidate pool without task-specific priors. To support systematic study, we propose GuessBench, a benchmark with both perception-oriented and knowledge-oriented images for evaluating active reasoning in MLLMs. We evaluate 20 superior MLLMs and find that performance on active reasoning lags far behind it on passive settings, indicating substantial room for improvement. Further analysis identifies fine-grained perception and timely decision-making as key challenges. Ablation studies show that perceptual enhancements benefit smaller models, whereas thinking-oriented methods provide consistent gains across model sizes. These results suggest promising directions for future research on multimodal active 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
Kaiyi Zhang, Ang Lv, Jinpeng Li, Yongbo Wang, Feng Wang, Haoyuan hu, Rui Yan Wuhan University
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for improving the complex reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, current RLVR methods face two significant challenges: the near-miss reward problem, where a small mistake can invalidate an otherwise correct reasoning process, greatly hindering training efficiency; and exploration stagnation, where models tend to focus on solutions within their ”comfort zone”, lacking the motivation to explore potentially more effective alternatives. To address these challenges, we propose StepHint, a novel RLVR algorithm that utilizes multi-level stepwise hints to help models explore the solution space more effectively. StepHint partitions valid reasoning chains into reasoning steps using our proposed adaptive partitioning method. The initial few steps are used as hints, and simultaneously, multiple-level hints (each comprising a different number of steps) are provided to the model. This approach directs the model’s exploration toward a promising solution subspace while preserving its flexibility for independent exploration. By providing hints, StepHint mitigates the near-miss reward problem, thereby improving training efficiency. Additionally, the external reasoning pathways help the model develop better reasoning abilities, enabling it to move beyond its ”comfort zone” and mitigate exploration stagnation. StepHint outperforms competitive RLVR enhancement methods across six mathematical benchmarks and two out-of-domain benchmarks.
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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
Eric Hanchen Jiang, Weixuan Ou, Run Liu, Shengyuan Pang, Guancheng Wan WanFlow AI and Wuhan University, Ranjie Duan Tencent, Wei Dong Nanyang Technological University, Kai-Wei Chang University of California, Los Angeles and Amazon 等 11 位作者
Safety alignment of large language models currently faces a central challenge: existing alignment techniques often prioritize mitigating responses to harmful prompts at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly refuse benign requests. A key goal of safe alignment is therefore to improve safety while simultaneously minimizing false refusals. In this work, we introduce Energy Landscape Steering (ELS), a novel, fine-tuning free framework designed to resolve this challenge through dynamic, inference-time intervention. We trained a lightweight, external Energy-Based Model (EBM) to assign high energy to undesirable (false refusal or jailbreak) states and low energy to desirable (helpful response or safe reject) ones. During inference, the EBM maps the LLM’s internal activations to an energy landscape, and we use the gradient of the energy function to steer the hidden states toward low-energy regions in real time. This dynamically guides the model toward desirable behavior without modifying its parameters. By decoupling behavioral control from the model’s core knowledge, ELS provides a flexible and computationally efficient solution. Extensive experiments across diverse models demonstrate its effectiveness: raising compliance on the ORB-H benchmark from 57.3% to 82.6% while maintaining the baseline safety performance. Our work establishes a promising paradigm for building LLMs that simultaneously achieve high safety and low false refusal rates.
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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
Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang Baidu, Yuchen Feng, Zhenyu Zhang Baidu Inc., Naibin Gu, Ziqi Wang, Tingwen Liu Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shuohuan Wang Baidu 等 11 位作者
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a cornerstone for scaling LLMs, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood, often leading to sub-optimal specialization. Moving beyond static routing, we present a systematic study of the MoE lifecycle using Helmholtz Free Energyand Router Entropy. We identify a universal Three-Stage Phase Transition—Exploration, Symmetry Breaking, and Stabilization—marked by an Energy Climb and Plateau. This reflects Frustrated Exploration, caused by structural interference between specialization drives and uniformity constraints. To address this, we propose Uncertainty-Aware Routing (UAR), which aligns routing with the model’s epistemic state via: (1) Evidence-Triggered Expansion, increasing active experts for high-energy tokens, and (2) Epistemic Masking, applying load-balancing only in high-uncertainty regimes to shield mature experts. Experiments confirm UAR reduces perplexity and improves expert distinctiveness, offering a principled path toward thermodynamically aligned computation.
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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
Pengze Guo, Jingxi Liang University of Macau, Zhiwen Xie Central China Normal University, Qifeng Wang, Derek F. Wong University of Macau
In the context of today’s high-pressure, aging society, the demand for large-scale emotional models capable of providing empathetic support is more critical than ever. However, existing benchmarks fail to simultaneously achieve ecological validity, signal clarity, and reliable fine-grained labeling. We introduce EmoS, a high-fidelity bilingual benchmark designed to resolve the limitations of ecological validity and noise in existing datasets by combining strictly filtered static slices with a dynamic Streaming Monologue subset. Supported by a rigorous dual-layer human annotation pipeline, EmoS provides trusted ground truth that captures continuous emotional evolution. Empirical results show that fine-tuning MLLMs (multimodal large language models) on EmoS yields significant gains over zero-shot baselines, laying the foundation for the training and evaluation of future emotion recognition models and empathy models. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/EmoS.
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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
Peizhuo Lv, Ruihua Zhou, Yunpeng Li Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ruigang Liang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xingshuo Han, XiaoFeng Wang Nanyang Technological University, Wei Dong Nanyang Technological University, Yuling Liu Institute of Information Engineering，CAS
Reasoning-enhanced large language models rely on intermediate reasoning signals to solve complex, multi-step tasks, making reasoning behavior a valuable form of intellectual property. Meanwhile, knowledge distillation enables an adversary to replicate this behavior in a realistic black-box setting by repeatedly querying a deployed model on a target domain and training a local student to imitate its outputs, including reasoning traces. Existing LLM watermarks primarily operate on surface text and decoding-time token biases, and thus fail to provide reliable attribution of reasoning behavior once it is transferred through knowledge distillation. ReasMark entangles the watermark with the target-domain input distribution by selecting watermark tokens from high-frequency prompts, so distillation queries naturally activate it. It then embeds the watermark by score-conditioned losses that create a detectable reasoning-length gap for black-box verification. Comprehensive experiments across multiple LLMs, datasets, and distillation settings demonstrate that ReasMark consistently outperforms existing baselines while preserving task utility.
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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
WenHao Wang, Peizhi Niu, Zhao Xu Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of California, Los Angeles and Tsinghua University, Zhaoyu Chen Tiktok, Jian Du TikTok, Yaxin Du, Xianghe Pang, Keduan Huang 等 11 位作者
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools to perform complex, realistic tasks, yet their ability to utilize the rapidly expanding Model Contextual Protocol (MCP) ecosystem remains limited. Existing MCP research covers few servers, depends on costly manual curation, and lacks training support, hindering progress toward real-world deployment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MCP-Flow, an automated web-agent-driven pipeline for large-scale server discovery, data synthesis, and model training. MCP-Flow collects and filters data from 1166 servers and 11536 tools, producing 68733 high-quality instruction-function call pairs and 6439 trajectories, far exceeding prior work in scale and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate MCP-Flow’s effectiveness in driving superior MCP tool selection, function-call generation, and enhanced agentic task performance. MCP-Flow thus provides a scalable foundation for advancing LLM agents’ proficiency in real-world MCP environments.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Shuyang Jiang, Yuhao Wang, Ya Zhang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yanfeng Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yu Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Current critic-free RL methods for large reasoning models suffer from severe inefficiency when training on positive homogeneous prompts (where all rollouts are correct), resulting in waste of rollouts due to zero advantage estimates. We introduce a radically simple yet powerful solution to Mine intrinsic mastery (Miner), that repurposes the policy’s intrinsic uncertainty as a self-supervised reward signal, with no external supervision, auxiliary models, or additional inference cost. Our method pioneers two key innovations: (1) a token-level focal credit assignment mechanism that dynamically amplifies gradients on critical uncertain tokens while suppressing overconfident ones, and (2) adaptive advantage calibration to seamlessly integrate intrinsic and verifiable rewards. Evaluated across six reasoning benchmarks on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B base models, Miner achieves state-of-the-art performance among the other four algorithms, yielding up to 4.58 absolute gains in Pass@1 and 6.66 gains in Pass@K compared to GRPO. Comparison with other methods targeted at exploration enhancement further discloses the superiority of the two newly proposed innovations. This demonstrates that latent uncertainty exploitation is both necessary and sufficient for efficient and scalable RL training of reasoning models. Code is available at https://github.com/pixas/Miner.
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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
Lina Yang Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yusheng Liao Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yanfeng Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yu Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks through large-scale pretraining. However, they remain prone to catastrophic forgetting in continual learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to identify noise accumulation in LoRA updates as a key cause of forgetting in continual learning. A preliminary two-task experiment demonstrates that removing less important components of the second task’s LoRA parameters improves performance on the first task, suggesting that later updates introduce noisy interference. Building on this insight, we propose Subspace-Denoised Low-Rank Adaptation (SLoRA), a simple and effective framework that filters noisy components from LoRA updates via subspace similarity with the base model. SLoRA is a regularization-free method without accessing data or gradients from previous tasks or modifying the training process. It offers two variants, SLoRA-Pre and SLoRA-Post, for online and offline continual learning, respectively. Extensive experiments across tasks and models validate the effectiveness of SLoRA. It improves final accuracy by up to 12%, reduces forgetting by 29%, and filters out over 30% of LoRA parameters identified as noisy. Our code is available at https://github.com/alina1031/SLoRA.
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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