As vision language models are increasingly deployed in clinical diagnosis, understanding how they internally resolve competing visual and textual signals becomes a safety imperative. Existing mechanistic analyses remain confined to unimodal text and offer no explanation for why a single misleading sentence can override a correct image based diagnosis, or why a model commits to a confident answer despite insufficient visual evidence. We find that these two safety risks, arbitration failure where textual context overrides visual grounding and brake failure where the model commits without adequate evidence, are mediated by spatially disjoint attention head populations: arbitration heads form a mid-to-deep wideband reflecting cross-layer evidence competition, while brake heads concentrate in a narrow middle-to-late layer band that regulates evidence sufficiency and abstention behavior. To ground these observations in causal circuitry, we introduce CRAFT, which localizes each failure mode to a minimal causal head set via dual criteria and verifies necessity and sufficiency through temporal probes and Tuned Lens trajectory analysis. Excising arbitration heads sharply reduces conflict following with negligible degradation on clean inputs, while excising brake heads restores appropriate abstention under degraded visual evidence. The two interventions target spatially disjoint head sets and produce distinct corrective effects, underscoring the mechanistic separability of the failure modes. Experiments across multiple medical VQA benchmarks and VLM architectures validate both the localization and interventions, demonstrating that the identified heads causally drive each failure mode and that targeted modulation generalises without retraining. The code is available at https://github.com/zhcz328/CRAFT.
Hao-Yu Hsu, Tianhang Cheng, Jing Wen, Alexander G. Schwing, Shenlong Wang
Understanding human activities and the objects they interact with typically relies on visual perception, yet cameras pose persistent challenges in privacy, safety, energy efficiency, and scalability. We explore an alternative: 4D perception without vision. Its goal is to recover human motion and the objects the person interacts with purely from everyday wearable sensors. For this we introduce IMU4D, a framework that repurposes large language models for non-visual spatiotemporal understanding of human-object dynamics. IMU4D uses data from a few inertial sensors from earbuds, watches, or smartphones and predicts detailed 4D human motion together with surrounding objects the person interacts with. Experiments across diverse human motion datasets and human-object datasets show that IMU4D yields more coherent and temporally stable results than SoTA cascaded pipelines, suggesting wearable motion sensors alone can support 4D understanding of human-object interactions.
Shengqin Wang, Jie Jin, Xiaofan Li, Wentao Yan, Yu Cheng, Qingsong HuYihang Chen, Weilin Luo, Jingyu Gong 等 11 位作者
Multimodal tool-using agents augment vision-language models with access to external information and capabilities, enabling them to solve knowledge-intensive and visually complex tasks that cannot be addressed using visual context alone. However, existing reinforcement learning pipelines largely train single-role agents to search and answer using terminal rewards, overlooking how humans inspect retrieved evidence, reformulate queries, and revise conclusions during search. Consequently, they fail to optimize this self-corrective process over complete interaction trajectories. We propose MRC-MMAgent, a multi-role collaborative reinforcement learning framework that incorporates trajectory assessment and continuation directly into the executable agent loop. First, the framework establishes a multi-role collaborative loop that integrates solving, inspection, and continuation, enabling the agent to acquire evidence through tools, evaluate the preceding trajectory, and resume problem solving when the current answer is insufficiently supported. Second, we introduce a role-coupled learning objective that combines task success, interaction validity, and successful correction with full-trajectory policy optimization across the decisions generated by all roles. Extensive experiments show that, using only the original baseline training set without constructing additional datasets, our method consistently outperforms the corresponding base models and achieves leading or highly competitive performance across benchmarks.
Zhefan Rao, Meng Chu, Xuan Billy Zhang, Jingfan Chen, Guohao Cai, Runyi Li, Shiyi Du, Xu Huang 等 92 位作者
World Models (WMs) can support Multimodal Agents (MAs) through simulated experience, while Agent trajectories can inform World Model refinement. Evaluating this interaction requires separate evidence about action selection and state evolution. We introduce Dual Exam, which tests Agents under fixed environment response mechanisms and World Models under fixed action interventions across physical, digital, social, and scientific domains. The Agent track compares 10 configurations on 1,088 items in 15 reporting categories. The World Model track contains 400 cases across eight scenarios; 15 configurations have full coverage and one covers six scenarios. GPT 6 Astra leads the case-weighted Agent Index at 31.3, and GPT-Image-2 leads the full-coverage WM Overall at 21.7. These scores use different tasks and metrics and are not directly comparable. A 150-case pilot of one coupled pairing records zero task successes and motivates component-level diagnosis. Results reveal uneven task performance and failures to preserve task-relevant state. Their value for predicting coupled success or sustained reciprocal learning remains to be established.
Henrique Schechter Vera, Sahil Dua, Jovan Andonov, Sara Smoot, Sebastian Russo, Ivan Llanos, Max Matveev, Jae Hyeon Yoo 等 73 位作者
We present EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model which natively represents text, images, audio, video, and combinations thereof in a unified space. Our approach introduces improvements such as simplified per-layer embeddings and a multi-stage curriculum with modality and objective progression which ensure strong quality across unimodal, cross-modal, and mixed-modal evaluations. Notably, in comprehensive embedding benchmarks across all modalities, EmbeddingGemma 2 establishes a new Pareto frontier, outperforming both specialist models and models two to twelve times larger. Furthermore, our design offers flexibility for resource-constrained environments, supporting selective modality encoder loading, adjustable vision token budgets, truncatable embedding dimensions, and quantized weights. We present ablations analyzing key decisions and release EmbeddingGemma 2 to promote further research.
This report presents the implementation and validation of two end-to-end multimodal adaptation pipelines for 3D-aware visual question answering on a custom spatial dataset. The first pipeline fine-tunes HiSpatial-3B, which augments RGB observations with metric-scale 3D point maps; the second adapts Qwen3-VL through memory-efficient QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning. The completed engineering stack covers dataset conversion, image-annotation alignment, monocular geometry preprocessing, instruction construction, mixed-domain training, checkpoint management, batch inference, and automated evaluation. On the target spatial benchmark, HiSpatial adaptation increases overall accuracy from 1.73% before fine-tuning to 79.89% at 3,600 steps. On a separately collected styled split, accuracy improves from 14.9% to 55.1%, indicating transfer beyond the original training set. The Qwen3-VL pipeline is likewise implemented end-to-end for both 8B- and 32B-scale models using mixed-domain QLoRA adaptation. The resulting accuracy improves from 20.74% to 45.27% for Qwen3-VL-8B and from 30.79% to 47.60% for Qwen3-VL-32B. Together, these results establish two complementary and reproducible adaptation pipelines for geometry-aware and general-purpose multimodal spatial reasoning. These results establish a reproducible engineering foundation for subsequent work on metric 3D reasoning, spatial grounding, and domain-adapted multimodal systems, while also identifying training-data composition as a central factor in preserving general multimodal capability during specialization.
Xi Cheng, Chenxi Zhai, Hang Cheng, Mingyu Fan, Pingfa Feng, Long Zeng
Parametric CAD modeling requires not only matching the target shape, but also preserving design intent under parameter edits. However, most existing methods focus on improving static shape generation accuracy, while the dependencies that govern later edits are often overlooked. To tackle this issue, we present DIP-CAD, a design-intent-preserving agent harness for generating parametric CAD models from images. DIP-CAD combines vision-language model reasoning with CAD kernel operations to establish dependencies that encode the design intent. In parametric CAD, these dependencies are mainly established through geometry references in modeling commands and constraints in parametric sketches. At the command level, ID-based explicit geometry reference binds modeling commands to selected faces, edges, or vertices. At the sketch level, a local-coordinate bridge ensures accurate sketch placement, providing the basis for correctly establishing sketch constraints. Constraints among sketch primitives and constraints to external projected geometry further preserve both internal sketch relationships and dependencies on existing geometry. To provide a more comprehensive data foundation for parametric CAD modeling tasks, we introduce the Geometry Explicit Reference Dataset (GERD), whose structured data format links stepwise modeling commands to intermediate CAD models through explicit geometry references. On GERD-EVL and a DeepCAD test subset, DIP-CAD improves mIoU for static model generation by 11.1% and 5.6%, respectively. In parameter-editing evaluations, the corresponding mIoU improvements are 7.0% and 4.2%. Case studies further demonstrate how parameter edits drive shape updates while preserving design intent.
Andie Huang, Ying Pang, Qian Zhang, Yihang Cheng, Lin Ma
Many LLMs now emit an explicit reasoning trace before they write code, but benchmark results for code generation and bug fixing usually report correctness alone. It is therefore unclear how much the extra reasoning contributes relative to the tokens it consumes. We examine this question with 866 Python tasks drawn from HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BugsInPy under five model settings. We look at the accuracy gain and token overhead of reasoning, the behaviors that appear inside reasoning traces, and whether a shortened trace still leads to a correct solution. Turning reasoning on in Qwen3-32B over five runs improves mean pass@1 on HumanEval Pro from 71.1% to 76.5% and mean tests pass on BugsInPy from 3.5% to 7.9%. On MBPP Pro the improvement from 68.1% to 69.5% is not statistically significant, even though the model uses a median of over 2,000 thinking tokens per task. Across models, a longer median trace does not reliably mean higher accuracy. A qualitative analysis shows that traces mostly choose and check an implementation in code generation, while in bug fixing they mostly locate the fault and plan the repair. We then truncate stored traces offline and ask Qwen3-32B with reasoning off to produce a solution from what remains. Retaining the first half of a trace yields no statistically significant drop in correctness. Stopping when the trace becomes repetitive seldom triggers, and stopping once solution code first appears benefits some models but harms others. Neither rule beats plain fixed truncation. These results suggest that more reasoning is not always better and that studies should report reasoning cost alongside correctness.
Yihang Chen, Bin Tan, Yujun Shen, Yinghao Xu, Nan Xue
Recent multi-view Transformers (e.g., DUSt3R and VGGT) have advanced 3D reconstruction by scaling training data and model capacity from two views to many views and long sequences, subsuming the classical SfM/SLAM pipeline of feature extraction, matching, and pose estimation in a single feed-forward pass. Yet this subsumption hides the interfaces between pipeline stages---correspondences, geometry, and pose are entangled in a single forward pass, leaving supervised fine-tuning as the major path to improvement and offering no mechanism to correct predictions from geometric evidence at test time. We propose PosePlaner to close this gap by reviving the classical coupling between correspondences and pose via flow matching, treating pose refinement as a conditional generation problem that takes coarse geometric matches and initial pose as input condition and fuses the resulting pose hypotheses into a single refined estimate, providing a continuous, data-driven analog of RANSAC voting. Our method is trained efficiently on two-view data, yet serves as a periodic refiner for streaming n-view pose estimators with no retraining. Empirically, it corrects failures of feed-forward predictors, substantially improves correspondence-based solvers, and reduces accumulated drift in long streaming sequences.
Embodied assistants in domestic environments must infer what happened, where and when it occurred, and how to respond. To address this, we introduce RMS-AQA, a spatial audio question answering (SAQA) benchmark for real-world domestic environments. The benchmark features a two-stage question-answering (QA) format to comprehensively assess the ability of audio-language models (ALMs) to first ground audible sound events and subsequently perform complex spatio-temporal reasoning based on that grounding. To maximize acoustic realism, our dataset combines authentic real-world first-order Ambisonics (FOA) recordings with high-fidelity synthetic data generated using measured room impulse responses (RIRs). Furthermore, we provide a lightweight spatial plug-in that injects FOA-format data into frozen audio-language backbones. Experimental results reveal that the primary challenges stem from concurrent sources, far distance, and sim-to-real domain gap between RIR-synthesized and authentic recordings.
Yuhang Chen, Tianpeng Lv Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Yao Wan Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Philip S. Yu University of Illinois Chicago, Dongping Chen
Academic project websites can more effectively disseminate research when they clearly present core content and enable intuitive navigation and interaction. However, current approaches such as direct Large Language Model (LLM) generation, templates, or direct HTML conversion struggle to produce layout-aware, interactive sites, and a comprehensive evaluation suite for this task has been lacking. In this paper, we introduce Paper2Web, a benchmark dataset and multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing academic webpage generation. It incorporates rule-based metrics like Connectivity, Completeness and human-verified LLM-as-a-Judge (covering interactivity, aesthetics, and informativeness), and PaperQuiz, which measures paper-level knowledge retention. We further present PWAgent, an autonomous pipeline that converts scientific papers into interactive and multimedia-rich academic homepages. The agent iteratively refines both content and layout through MCP tools that enhance emphasis, balance, and presentation quality. Our experiments show that PWAgent consistently outperforms end-to-end baselines like template-based webpages and arXiv/alphaXiv versions by a large margin while maintaining low cost, achieving the Pareto-front in academic webpage generation.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Linlin Yu Augusta University, Xujiang Zhao NEC Labs America, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu NEC-Labs, Wei Cheng NEC-Labs, Zhengzhang Chen NEC Labs America, Chen Zhao Baylor University, Feng Chen University of Texas, Dallas 等 9 位作者
Automatically solving optimization problems from natural language descriptions with both efficiency and reliability is highly desirable but remains challenging. Language model hallucinations and the limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors, and feasibility failures We propose UMCTS, an Uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that combines the language understanding capability of large language models with the reliability of well-established solvers. UMCTS structures the solution process into four stages: global instruction, assumptions, mathematical formulation, and solver code generation. It employs Monte Carlo Tree Search with semantic-equivalence pruning, prior-guided exploration, and solver-based feasibility checks. An LLM judge provides numerical reward signals, qualitative error information, and uncertainty estimates. These signals are backpropagated to guide the search and flag unreliable outputs. Across six public benchmarks, UMCTS achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy, improves efficiency by reducing token usage.
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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
Xuyuan Liu Dartmouth College, Shengyu Chen NEC Laboratories America Inc and University of Pittsburgh, Xinshuai Dong, Yanchi Liu NEC-Labs, Xujiang Zhao NEC Labs America, Haoyu Wang NEC Labs America, Yujun Yan Dartmouth College, Haifeng Chen NEC-Labs 等 9 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated content. Updating their knowledge efficiently and accurately without costly retraining is a major challenge. This problem is particularly challenging for complex, unstructured knowledge in lifelong settings, where many edits must coexist without interference. We introduce RILKE (Representation Intervention for Lifelong KnowledgE Control), a robust and scalable method that treats knowledge control as interventions within the model’s representation space. Leveraging representation-space expressiveness, we identify two key properties enabling RILKE to achieve fine-grained control over complex, unstructured knowledge while maintaining general utility with frozen base weights. During training, RILKE learns paraphrase-robust and edit-localized modules that limit each update to a low-dimensional subspace to minimize cross-edit interference. In inference, a query-adaptive router selects the appropriate module to guide the model’s generation. Across LLaMA and Qwen models, RILKE scales effectively to large-scale benchmarks, demonstrating high edit success and strong paraphrase generalization while preserving general utility with modest memory overhead. These results show RILKE is an effective and scalable solution for lifelong knowledge control in LLMs.
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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
Shuhang Chen, Hangjie Yuan DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group, Yunqiu Xu National University of Singapore, Pengwei Liu, Tao Feng Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Jun Cen Alibaba Group, Zeying Huang Intelligent Learning Tech(Zhejiang), Yi Yang Zhejiang University
Despite strong results on many tasks, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still underperform on visual mathematical problem solving, especially in reliably perceiving and interpreting diagrams. Inspired by human problem-solving, we hypothesize that the ability to extract meaningful information from diagrams is pivotal, as it directly conditions subsequent inference.Hence, we introduce FlowVerse, a comprehensive benchmark that provides a fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs’ perception and reasoning capabilities. Our preliminary results on FlowVerse reveal that existing MLLMs exhibit substantial limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs. In response, we introduce MathFlow, a modular problem-solving pipeline that decouples perception and inference into distinct stages, thereby optimizing each independently. Given the perceptual limitations observed in current MLLMs, we trained MathFlow-P-7B as a dedicated perception model.Experimental results indicate that MathFlow-P-7B yields substantial performance gains when integrated with various closed-source and open-source inference models. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the MathFlow pipeline and its compatibility with diverse inference frameworks. Project page: https://github.com/MathFlow-zju/MathFlow.
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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
Binchi Zhang University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Zhengzhang Chen NEC Labs America, Zaiyi Zheng, Jundong Li University of Virginia, Haifeng Chen NEC-Labs
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing by encoding extensive knowledge, but their utility relies on timely updates as human knowledge keeps evolving. In this paper, we investigate the problem of LLM knowledge updates, which requires simultaneously unlearning unwanted information and learning new knowledge. Existing approaches that tackle unlearning and learning separately encounter task conflicts and knowledge management issues when applied to comprehensive knowledge updates.In this paper, we validate our findings with theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, and propose LOKA, a conflict-aware framework for Large language mOdel Knowledge updAtes. During training, LOKA introduces an adaptive knowledge memory approach in which updated knowledge is allocated across multiple memory units. During inference, LOKA retrieves the most relevant memory unit from the knowledge memory and integrates it with the original LLM to apply updated knowledge, while a learning-based router controls the activation of the knowledge memory to improve knowledge utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of LOKA in achieving accurate, flexible, and conflict-aware knowledge updates.
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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
Binchi Zhang University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Xujiang Zhao NEC Labs America, Jundong Li University of Virginia, Haifeng Chen NEC-Labs, Zhengzhang Chen NEC Labs America
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally sensitive real-world tasks. However, existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs’ broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-culture interference. We propose CultureManager, a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment. CultureManager synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats, grounded in culturally relevant web search results. To prevent conflicts between cultural norms, it manages multi-culture knowledge learned in separate adapters with a culture router that selects the appropriate one to apply. Experiments across five national cultures and ten culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines. Our results demonstrate the necessity of task adaptation and modular culture management for effective cultural alignment.
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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
Zhuo Chen, Minghao Li, Xiaoqian Ma Xiaohongshu, Siqi Fan University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Xiusheng Huang, Zhang Liujie Xiaohongshu, Weihang Chen
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) enables hardware-agnostic LLM compression via low-rank approximation, yet optimal rank allocation remains a bottleneck. Existing methods predominantly derive layer importance from performance-oriented proxies. Yet, these metrics fail to distinguish between representational importance and structural compressibility, consequently obscuring the fine-grained influence of spectral distribution shape. We demonstrate this disconnect through spectral analysis, revealing that layers with similar information capacity can exhibit markedly different singular value decay behaviors, corresponding to varying degrees of redundancy in the spectral tail. This imperfect coupling implies that allocation strategies driven solely by importance leave significant compression opportunities underexploited. To address this gap, we propose HiSVD, a hierarchical rank allocation framework with two stages: (1) Capacity-Anchored Baseline Allocation, which preserves representational stability by aligning rank budgets with information capacity; and (2) Redundancy-Aware Refinement, which modulates this baseline using tail redundancy to penalize structural excess. Experiments on LLMs demonstrate that HiSVD achieves superior compression efficiency, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by effectively exploiting this spectral heterogeneity.
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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