Shuyue Stella Li, Priyanka Kargupta, Haocheng Wang, Jinu Lee, Dean Light, Shan Chen, Orevaoghene Ahia, Thomas L. Griffiths 等 12 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems yet fail on simpler variants, suggesting they achieve correct outputs through mechanisms fundamentally different from human reasoning. To understand this gap, we synthesize cognitive science research into a taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements spanning reasoning invariants, meta-cognitive controls, representations for organizing reasoning and knowledge, and transformation operations. We introduce a fine-grained evaluation framework and apply it to 192K traces from 18 models across text, vision, and audio, alongside 1,346 human think-aloud traces on a new, domain-agnostic dataset for human-model comparison. We find that models are able to deploy cognitive elements seen in human reasoning but differ in how they use them. Leveraging these patterns, we develop test-time reasoning guidance that automatically scaffolds successful reasoning topologies, improving the accuracy of the strongest models by 9.7 percentage points on ill-structured problems. Meta-analysis of 1.6K LLM reasoning papers reveals the research community concentrates on easily quantifiable elements but rarely targets self-awareness, whose use differs between human and model reasoning. By establishing a shared vocabulary between cognitive science and LLM research, our framework enables diagnosis of reasoning failures and principled development of models that reason through robust cognitive mechanisms rather than spurious shortcuts, while providing tools to test theories of human cognition at scale.
This paper addresses safe coordination of scalar agents with constrained input dynamics over fixed rooted digraphs. We propose a networked Admissibility-Preserving Control (APC) architecture for a common moving output corridor under heterogeneous asymmetric input bounds, wherein the Admissibility-Preserving Input Realization (APIR) generates the physical inputs. In logarithmic barrier coordinates, the closed-loop dynamics form an exact cascade of exponentially decaying realization errors and directed consensus dynamics. We derive direction-specific compatibility conditions that guarantee uniform corridor and input margins, bounded commands, unique complete solutions, and exponential consensus for compact initial sets. The closed-form expression for the agreement value quantifies the effect of the initial APIR mismatch. Under the corresponding compatibility conditions, partial pinning guarantees safe reference tracking whenever the root component contains at least one informed agent. Simulations illustrate the coordination guarantees.
Guanming Liu, Yuqi Ren, Hansu Gu, Peng Zhang, Weihang Wang, Jiahao Liu, Ning Gu, Tun Lu
A central role of personal-agent memory is to turn stored information and prior interactions into future-oriented assistance. In daily use, useful cues come from what the agent observes and how the user interacts with the agent, and the agent must carry them forward from the current request to similar future tasks. Existing memory benchmarks usually test dialogue recall or task improvement in isolation, leaving the trajectory from streaming observations to later assistance largely untested. We introduce StreamMemBench, a streaming benchmark that constructs a two-step task sequence around each evidence anchor from EgoLife egocentric streams. The initial task tests evidence use, while the follow-up task tests whether feedback and interaction experience are reused. Four metrics diagnose evidence recall, initial evidence use, feedback incorporation, and follow-up reuse. Experiments with eight memory systems across two backbones show that current systems often fail to use observed evidence or turn feedback into reliable follow-up behavior, even when evidence is stored or feedback is incorporated locally. StreamMemBench is publicly available at https://github.com/landian60/StreamMemBench.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning is a key method for training multi-robot systems. Through rewarding or punishing robots over a series of episodes according to their performance, they can be trained and then deployed in the real world. However, poorly trained policies can lead to unsafe behaviour during early training stages. We introduce Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning guided by language-based Inter-robot Negotiation (MARLIN), a hybrid framework in which large language models provide high-level planning before the reinforcement learning policy has learned effective behaviours. Robots use language models to negotiate actions and generate plans that guide policy learning. The system dynamically switches between reinforcement learning and language-model-based negotiation during training, enabling more effective exploration. MARLIN is evaluated using both simulated and physical robots with local and remote language models. Results show that, compared to standard multi-agent reinforcement learning, the hybrid approach achieves higher performance in early training with limited impact on the final performance. The code is available at https://github.com/SooratiLab/MARLIN.
Yuanbo Hou, Kening Guo, Francesco Aletta, Woon-Seng Gan, Dick Botteldooren, Jian Kang
Soundscape studies ask listeners to rate perceived affective quality (PAQ) attributes, such as pleasant and vibrant, after listening to recordings or experiencing acoustic environments. These retrospective ratings summarise an experience during which impressions may change. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) procedures convert these PAQ ratings into Pleasantness and Eventfulness scores. Pleasantness and Eventfulness (P/E) can also be rated directly and continuously during listening, capturing changes in reported perception over time. Retrospective PAQ ratings and continuous direct P/E describe the same soundscape experience from different perspectives. We examine how PAQs relate to direct P/E and how ISO-derived P/E corresponds to direct judgements, using 1,782 paired 30-s trials involving audiovisual recordings from 18 streets. The results show that PAQs retain a predominantly two-dimensional structure. Vibrant and Monotonous lie closer to the Eventfulness-Uneventfulness axis in the direct P/E plane than in the ISO 2025 reference geometry. The full 30-s direct P/E mean has lower calibrated error against ISO-derived P/E than three 10-s means. An empirical mapping using the same 8 PAQs reduces held-out joint root-mean-square error by 4.9% relative to affine-calibrated ISO 2025 scoring. The findings show that retrospective and continuous assessments offer related but distinct soundscape descriptions.
Small-molecule identification from tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) may require complementary measurements. Herein, we propose a structure-informed deep Q-network (SI-DQN) that uses existing MS/MS evidence to decide whether further characterization is needed, which measurement to request, and when to stop. The policy combines spectral representations and candidate rankings with score-weighted descriptors of the candidates' chemical features and structural differences. The policy was evaluated on 79,462 held-out samples with simulated MS/MS, infrared (IR), and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra from the Multimodal Spectroscopic Dataset. Evaluation used fixed hard candidate sets containing the correct structure and equal normalized acquisition costs. Averaged across three training runs, SI-DQN increased Top-1 accuracy from 80.10% to 93.78% for positive-ion MS/MS starts and from 70.44% to 93.31% for negative-ion starts. The corresponding mean additional measurement counts were only 0.227 and 0.340 per sample, respectively. Complete acquisition achieved 97.72% accuracy with four additions, whereas SI-DQN reduced the additional measurement count by 94.3% and 91.5%. Relative to a rule-based policy, SI-DQN reduced the composite loss combining terminal ranking error and acquisition cost by 19.3% and 25.5%. Adding structural information to DQN further improved accuracy while reducing requests across all three training runs. At comparable ranking uncertainty, SI-DQN increased request rates relative to DQN more strongly in groups with high structural disagreement, where larger reductions in composite loss were also observed. Together, these results support using the ambiguity among candidate structures after MS/MS analysis to guide further characterization, providing a quantitative basis for balancing identification performance against subsequent measurement effort.
Reinforcement learning has advanced large language models on tasks with reliable verifiers, where checking an outcome provides a clear basis for reward. Extending this approach to open-ended tasks requires environments that can both evaluate complex, partially successful outputs and turn these judgments into effective learning guidance. We propose a reinforcement learning framework built around a training environment that integrates human domain knowledge with model reasoning. Human domain knowledge, encoded in rubrics, anchors evaluation to task intent, while model reasoning combined with hierarchical rewards distinguishes complex open-ended outputs and links diagnosed failures to likely responsible output regions. Furthermore, these diagnostic attributions guide token-level weights in the GRPO objective, thereby translating the ambiguous notion of success in open-ended tasks into concrete guidance for policy optimization. We instantiate this framework in interactive web application generation, a representative open-ended generation task. The resulting model achieves an average pass rate of 41.25\% on MiniAppBench and 76.19\% on ArtifactsBench. Ablation studies show the contributions of individual components, while additional out-of-distribution evaluations support transferable gains without degrading performance on other evaluated tasks.
Large-scale low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations offer a promising platform for global low-latency networking, in part because signals propagate faster in free space than in fiber and copper. In such systems, end-to-end latency is largely determined by the inter-satellite link (ISL) topology. In particular, the network diameter--the longest shortest path, in hops, between any pair of satellites--serves as a key performance metric for time-sensitive applications. Designing diameter-optimal topologies is challenging due to node degree constraints, orbital dynamics, and the combinatorial nature of link selection. This paper proposes a two-stage optimization framework for ISL topology design. First, a continuous relaxation of the link-selection problem is formulated as a convex program that maximizes the algebraic connectivity of the graph Laplacian, serving as a tractable surrogate for diameter minimization. Second, the resulting fractional solution is mapped to a feasible topology via maximum-weight b-matching, a problem solvable in polynomial time. Simulations on Walker-Delta constellations show that the proposed method consistently achieves smaller network diameters than a local-search baseline and standard patterned topologies. For a 1,584-satellite constellation in which each satellite has four ISLs of up to 2,500 km, the diameter is as small as 12 hops, and the maximum propagation delay between any two satellites is about 90 ms. With up- and downlinks adding up to 8 ms, the user-to-user propagation delay is at most about 98 ms, comparable to the delay over a great-circle fiber route between antipodal points on Earth.
Haotian He, Zeyu Yan, Qipeng Liu, Ning Guo, Wenzhao Lian
Force signals provide critical interaction cues for contact-rich robotic manipulation. However, existing methods mostly use force as an additional observation modality, without fully exploiting its role in modeling future interaction dynamics or guiding execution-time feedback correction. In this paper, we propose FAWAM, a force-aware world action model that incorporates force information at three levels: perception, prediction, and closed-loop execution. FAWAM first encodes historical 6-axis force/torque signals to modulate action generation, then jointly predicts future actions and end-effector wrenches to explicitly model contact evolution. It further introduces a residual correction module that uses the predicted wrench trajectory as an execution-time reference to refine actions online based on real-time force feedback. Real-world experiments across multiple contact-rich tasks show that FAWAM improves the average success rate by 36.25% over vision-only baselines and 21.25% over existing force-aware baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our force-aware framework for robust contact-rich manipulation.
Shengzhang Xu, Yuning Guo, Weiyi Hu, Yifeng Xu, Zhongyu Li, He Kong
Humanoid locomotion in confined spaces requires continuous height adaptation across multiple locomotion modes, yet most existing approaches remain limited to height-adjustable bipedal walking. We present REACH, an RL-based hierarchical framework that enables a Unitree G1 humanoid to traverse height-constrained environments through variable-height bipedal walking and crawling. The learned policies regulate body height over complementary command ranges of 1.27--0.50m in bipedal locomotion and 0.50--0.20m in crawling, extending traversal beyond the clearance limits of crouched walking. To address contact-rich crawling dynamics, we employ a history-conditioned latent representation that captures terrain and interaction context from proprioceptive observations. A bidirectional transition policy further connects crouched bipedal locomotion and crawling across large kinematic and contact discontinuities. These skills are integrated with a LiDAR-based planner that converts point clouds into collision-free three-dimensional paths and locomotion commands, including proactive height targets. Real-world experiments demonstrate accurate height and velocity tracking, robust terrain traversal, reliable mode transitions and confined-space traversal with the proposed pipeline. Code and videos are available at https://aislab-sustech.github.io/REACH/.
Deep neural networks typically rely on architectures specified before training, despite the continuous evolution of their internal representations. We introduce FlowGenesis, a framework in which neural architectures adapt through neuron birth and pruning guided by Representation Flux, a local statistic capturing changes in minibatch mean activations. Neurons exhibiting persistently high Flux undergo splitting designed to approximately preserve the network function, while neurons with low Flux and low activity are pruned. This mechanism allows network capacity to evolve without prescribing a target architecture or performing a separate architecture search. Experiments on image and text classi- fication show that networks initialized with different sizes approach similar final neuron-count ranges within each dataset while maintaining comparable predictive performance. We further extend FlowGenesis to continual learning, where representation-guided structural adaptation reduces the neurons and parameters allocated to successive tasks while maintaining accuracy comparable to fixed-width Progressive Neural Networks in a task-incremental learning setting. These findings demonstrate that neural architectures can adapt through feedback between representation learning and structural change, suggesting an alternative to prescribing network capacity before training.
Ziyun Zhang, Zezhou Wang, Xiaoyi Zhang Microsoft, Zongyu Guo Microsoft Research, Jiahao Li Microsoft Research Asia, Bin Li Microsoft, Yan Lu Microsoft Research Asia
GUI agents that interact with graphical interfaces on behalf of users are a promising direction for practical AI assistants, yet training them is hindered by scarce suitable environments. We present InfiniteWeb, a system that automatically generates functional web environments at scale for GUI agent training. While LLMs perform well on generating a single webpage, building a realistic and functional website with many interconnected pages faces challenges. We address these challenges through unified specification, task-centric test-driven development, and combining website seed variation with reference design images. Our system also generates verifiable task evaluators enabling dense reward signals for reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our system surpasses commercial coding agents at realistic website construction, and GUI agents trained on our generated environments achieve significant performance improvements on OSWorld and Online-Mind2Web, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed system.
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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
Pengna Li, Kangyi Wu, Shaoqing Xu, Fang Li, Lin Zhao, Long Chen Xiaomi, Zhi-Xin Yang University of Macau, Nanning Zheng Xi'an Jiaotong University
Image-goal navigation steers an agent to a target location specified by an image in unseen environments. Existing methods primarily handle this task by learning an end-to-end navigation policy, which compares the similarities of target and observation images and directly predicts the actions. However, when the target is distant or lies in another room, such methods fail to extract informative visual cues, leading the agent to wander around. Motivated by the human cognitive principle that deliberate, high-level reasoning guides fast, reactive execution in complex tasks, we propose Hierarchical Reasoning Navigation (HRNav), a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. In high-level planning, a vision-language model is trained on a self-collected dataset to generate a short-horizon plan, such as whether the agent should walk through the door or down the hallway. This downgrades the difficulty of the long-horizon task, making it more amenable to the execution part. In low-level execution, an online reinforcement learning policy is utilized to decide actions conditioned on the short-horizon plan. We also devise a novel Wandering Suppression Penalty (WSP) to further reduce the wandering problem. Together, these components form a hierarchical framew ork for Image-Goal Navigation. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method.
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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
Subham Raj Indian Institute of Technology, Patna, Aman Vaibhav Jha, Mayank Anand, Sriparna Saha
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) operate under incremental preference revelation, requiring recommendation decisions under uncertainty. While recent LLM-based approaches achieve strong performance on proxy metrics such as Recall@K and BLEU, they often fail to deliver high-quality, user-aligned recommendations in practice, as they optimize intermediate objectives like retrieval accuracy or fluent generation rather than recommendation quality itself. We propose HARPO (Hierarchical Agentic Reasoning with Preference Optimization), an agentic framework that reframes conversational recommendation as a structured decision-making process optimized for multi-dimensional recommendation quality. HARPO integrates (i) hierarchical preference learning that decomposes recommendation quality into interpretable dimensions (relevance, diversity, satisfaction, and engagement) with context-dependent weighting; (ii) deliberative tree-search reasoning guided by a learned value network evaluating candidate paths on predicted quality; and (iii) domain-agnostic reasoning abstractions through Virtual Tool Operations and multi-agent refinement. We evaluate HARPO on ReDial, INSPIRED, and MUSE, demonstrating consistent improvements over strong baselines on recommendation-centric metrics while maintaining competitive response quality.
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cs.CL · cs.AI · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Kon Woo Kim National Institute of Informatics, Jin-Dong Kim Research Organization of Information and Systems, Akiko Aizawa National Institute of Informatics
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable zero-shot annotation tasks, they often struggle with the specialized conventions of gold-standard benchmarks. We propose the systematic reuse and refinement of annotation guidelines as an alignment mechanism, introducing an iterative moderation framework that simulates the early phases of annotation projects. We evaluate three hypotheses: (1) the efficacy of guideline integration, (2) the advantage of reasoning-optimized models, and (3) the viability of moderation under minimal supervision. Testing across biomedical NER tasks (NCBI Disease, BC5CDR, BioRED) with three LLM families (GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek), our results empirically confirm all three hypotheses. While the iterative moderation framework shows a good potential in effectively refining guidelines, our analysis also reveals a significant room for improvement.
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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
Tingyu Song University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yanzhao Zhang Alibaba Group, Mingxin Li Alibaba Group, Zhuoning Guo Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie Alibaba Group, Siyue Zhang, Yilun Zhao Yale University 等 9 位作者
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a pivotal and complex task in multimodal understanding. Current CIR benchmarks typically feature limited query categories and fail to capture the diverse requirements of real-world scenarios. To bridge this evaluation gap, we leverage image editing to achieve precise control over modification types and content, enabling a pipeline for synthesizing queries across a broad spectrum of categories. Using this pipeline, we construct EDIR, a novel fine-grained CIR benchmark. EDIR encompasses 5,000 high-quality queries structured across five main categories and fifteen subcategories. Our comprehensive evaluation of 13 multimodal embedding models reveals a significant capability gap; even state-of-the-art models (e.g., RzenEmbed and GME) struggle to perform consistently across all subcategories, highlighting the rigorous nature of our benchmark. Through comparative analysis, we further uncover inherent limitations in existing benchmarks, such as modality biases and insufficient categorical coverage. Furthermore, an in-domain training experiment demonstrates the feasibility of our benchmark. This experiment clarifies the task challenges by distinguishing between categories that are solvable with targeted data and those that expose intrinsic limitations of current model architectures.
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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
Fangming Feng, Dongjie Fu, Zequn Xie, Yu Zhang, Yangyang Wu Zhejiang University, Zhou Zhao, Tao Jin Zhejiang University
While diffusion and flow-matching models have advanced TTS, generating high-arousal emotions remains a persistent challenge due to the trade-off between stability and expressiveness. Existing systems often suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels under stable settings. In this work, we identify that standard Gaussian initialization inevitably introduces a neutral prosody bias, while uniform Classifier-Free Guidance often distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. To address this, we propose an inference framework that rectifies the emotional trajectory. An Emotion-Rectified Noise Prior injects a semantic gradient at initialization to align sampling with the target emotional manifold, and Likelihood-Inverse Guidance adaptively schedules guidance via a conditional/unconditional likelihood ratio, strengthening guidance only when the trajectory drifts toward a neutral fallback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively resolves the stability bottleneck in high-intensity scenarios, achieving superior linguistic accuracy and emotional fidelity without model retraining. Audio samples are available at https://showtts.github.io/emotionTTS/.
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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
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for multimodal reasoning. Yet, most existing methods still rely on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to encode image-text pairs in isolation, ignoring the relational structure that real-world multimodal data naturally form. This motivates reasoning on multimodal graphs (MMGs), where each node has textual and visual attributes and edges provide structural cues. Enabling LLM-based reasoning on such heterogeneous multimodal signals while preserving graph topology introduces two key challenges: resolving weak cross-modal consistency and handling heterogeneous modality preference. To address this, we propose Mario, a unified framework that simultaneously resolves the two above challenges and enables effective LLM-based reasoning over MMGs. Mario consists of two innovative stages. Firstly, a graph-conditioned VLM design that jointly refines textual and visual features through fine-grained cross-modal contrastive learning guided by graph topology. Secondly, a modality-adaptive graph instruction tuning mechanism that organizes aligned multimodal features into graph-aware instruction views and employs a learnable router to surface, for each node and its neighborhood, the most informative modality configuration to the LLM. Extensive experiments across diverse MMG benchmarks demonstrate that Mario consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph models in both supervised and zero-shot scenarios for node classification and link prediction. The code will be made available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/Mario.
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cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
The unrealistic reliance on abundant prior information in traditional transferable attacks has spurred the Practical No-box Scenario (PNS), where attackers can access only limited unlabeled images. However, existing methods rely on iterative optimization to produce adversarial examples with inherently limited inference speed and transferability. Conversely, faster generative attacks fundamentally conflict with the PNS due to their critical dependence on abundant prior information that is explicitly absent in this scenario. To bridge this gap, we propose Prior-free Generative Attack (PGA), the first generative attack tailored for the PNS. Specifically, we introduce the Curriculum-Guided Micro-Robust Optimization that progressively incorporates more challenging discriminative tasks to mitigate the degenerate solutions common in self-supervised learning with limited data, yielding robust and transferable surrogates for downstream attacks. Furthermore, the Region-Aware Consistent Perturbation Learning guides the generator to produce fine-grained and spatially coherent perturbations, mitigating the common pitfall of generative attacks falling into local optima under insufficient supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PGA achieves remarkable transferability across various settings with high inference speed. This work provides a more practical benchmark for future research on transferable attacks, revealing the great potential of generative attacks under the PNS.
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cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
In hematoxylin-eosin (H&E) to virtual immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining, paired images enable supervised learning but suffer from inherent spatial dislocation, limiting pixel-level constraints. Thus, auxiliary tasks have been increasingly employed with paired data to provide complementary supervision. However, existing methods largely overlook the rich semantic information embedded in auxiliary task models. This paper proposes a novel framework for virtual IHC staining guided by dual-aligned multi-task features, which fully explores semantic cues from auxiliary tasks. To realize effective guidance, we address two obstacles: (1) the spatial mismatch between paired H&E and IHC feature representations; (2) the task gap between auxiliary task features and virtual staining features. To resolve the spatial mismatch, we generate an alignment matrix that aligns H&E and IHC features. Specifically, we first introduce structure-enhanced learning to restore semantic consistency in regions affected by inaccurate staining in virtual IHC images. Then, we separately cluster features from virtual IHC and real IHC images, and establish semantic correspondences using an active-passive matching mechanism. This ensures that only semantically aligned regions are matched, reducing the impact of staining variability on the alignment matrix. To bridge the task gap, we introduce a task-gap alignment module trained under the principle that auxiliary features are considered aligned if they improve the performance of the virtual IHC staining model. Extensive experiments on two public datasets with four biomarkers demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Code is available at https://github.com/U-RBook/VSMT.
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cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as promising alternatives to autoregressive (AR) LLMs. Recently, this paradigm has been extended to multimodal tasks, leading to the development of diffusion multimodal large language models (dMLLMs). These models are expected to retain the reasoning capabilities of LLMs while enabling faster inference through parallel generation. However, when combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, dMLLMs exhibit two critical issues.First, we observe that dMLLMs often generate the final answer token at a very early timestep. This trend indicates that the model determines the answer before sufficient reasoning, leading to degraded reasoning performance. Second, during the initial timesteps, dMLLMs show minimal dependency on visual prompts, exhibiting a fundamentally different pattern of visual information utilization compared to AR vision-language models. In summary, these findings indicate that dMLLMs tend to generate premature final answers without sufficiently grounding on visual inputs.To address these limitations, we propose Position & Step Penalty (PSP) and Visual Reasoning Guidance (VRG). PSP penalizes tokens in later positions during early timesteps, delaying premature answer generation and encouraging progressive reasoning across timesteps. VRG, inspired by the classifier-free guidance, amplifies visual grounding signals to enhance the model's alignment with visual evidence.Extensive experiments across various dMLLMs demonstrate that our method achieves up to 7.5% higher accuracy while delivering more than 3x speedup compared to reasoning with four times more diffusion steps. Our code will be released after publication.
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cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
End-to-end text-image machine translation (TIMT), which directly translates textual content in images across languages, is crucial for real-world multilingual scene understanding. Despite advances in vision-language large models (VLLMs), robustness across diverse visual scenes and low-resource languages remains underexplored due to limited evaluation resources. We present MMTIT-Bench, a human-verified multilingual and multi-scenario benchmark with 1,400 images spanning fourteen non-English and non-Chinese languages and diverse settings such as documents, scenes, and web images, enabling rigorous assessment of end-to-end TIMT. Beyond benchmarking, we study how reasoning-oriented data design improves translation. Although recent VLLMs have begun to incorporate long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, effective thinking paradigms for TIMT are still immature: existing designs either cascade parsing and translation in a sequential manner or focus on language-only reasoning, overlooking the visual cognition central to VLLMs. We propose Cognition-Perception-Reasoning for Translation (CPR-Trans), a data paradigm that integrates scene cognition, text perception, and translation reasoning within a unified reasoning process. Using a VLLM-driven data generation pipeline, CPR-Trans provides structured, interpretable supervision that aligns perception with reasoning. Experiments on 3B and 7B models show consistent gains in accuracy and interpretability. We will release MMTIT-Bench to promote the multilingual and multi-scenario TIMT research upon acceptance.
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cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
This paper focuses on embodied task planning, where an agent acquires visual observations from the environment and executes atomic actions to accomplish a given task. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results in multimodal understanding and reasoning, their performance remains limited when applied to embodied planning that involves multi-turn interaction, long-horizon reasoning, and extended context analysis. To bridge this gap, we propose RoboAgent, a capability-driven planning pipeline in which the model actively invokes different sub-capabilities. Each capability maintains its own context, and produces intermediate reasoning results or interacts with the environment according to the query given by a scheduler. This framework decomposes complex planning into a sequence of basic vision-language problems that VLMs can better address, enabling a more transparent and controllable reasoning process. The scheduler and all capabilities are implemented with a single VLM, without relying on external tools. To train this VLM, we adopt a multi-stage paradigm that consists of: (1) behavior cloning with expert plans, (2) DAgger training using trajectories collected by the model, and (3) reinforcement learning guided by an expert policy. Across these stages, we exploit the internal information of the environment simulator to construct high-quality supervision for each capability, and we further introduce augmented and synthetic data to enhance the model's performance in more diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments on widely used embodied task planning benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Su, Shaolin, Rocafort, Josep M., Xue, Danna, Serrano-Lozano, David, Sun, Lei, Vazquez-Corral, Javier
As super-resolution (SR) techniques advance, we observe a growing distrust of evaluation metrics in recent SR research. An inconsistency often emerges between certain evaluation criteria and human perceptual preference. Although current SR research employs varying metrics to evaluate SR performance, it remains underexplored how robust and reliable these metrics actually are. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of widely used image quality metrics, examining their consistency with human perception when evaluating state-of-the-art SR models. We show that some metrics exhibit only limited--or even negative--correlation with human preferences. We further identify several intrinsic challenges in SR evaluation that compromise the effectiveness of both full-reference (FR) and no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) frameworks. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective Relative Quality Index (RQI) framework, which assesses the relative quality discrepancy between image pairs. Our framework enables easy integration and notable improvements for existing IQA metrics in SR evaluation. Moreover, it can be utilized as a valuable training guide for SR models, enabling the generation of images with more realistic details while maintaining structural fidelity.
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cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel on benchmarks, their processing paradigm differs from the human ability to integrate visual information. Unlike humans who naturally bridge details and high-level concepts, models tend to treat these elements in isolation. Prevailing evaluation protocols often decouple low-level perception from high-level reasoning, overlooking their semantic and causal dependencies, which yields non-diagnostic results and obscures performance bottlenecks. We present VCU-Bridge, a framework that operationalizes a human-like hierarchy of visual connotation understanding: multi-level reasoning that advances from foundational perception through semantic bridging to abstract connotation, with an explicit evidence-to-inference trace from concrete cues to abstract conclusions. Building on this framework, we construct HVCU-Bench, a benchmark for hierarchical visual connotation understanding with explicit, level-wise diagnostics. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate a consistent decline in performance as reasoning progresses to higher levels. We further develop a data generation pipeline for instruction tuning guided by Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and show that strengthening low-level capabilities yields measurable gains at higher levels. Interestingly, it not only improves on HVCU-Bench but also brings benefits on general benchmarks (average +2.53%), especially with substantial gains on MMStar (+7.26%), demonstrating the significance of the hierarchical thinking pattern and its effectiveness in enhancing MLLM capabilities.
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cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Wang, Dongsheng, Zhang, Jinsen, Su, Dawei, Huang, Hui
Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for each neuron remains challenging in practice: excessive sparsity might lead to poor reconstruction, whereas insufficient sparsity harms interpretability. While existing activation functions such as ReLU and TopK provide certain sparsity guarantees, they typically require additional sparsity regularization or cherry-picked hyperparameters. We show in this paper that adaptive sparse attention mechanisms using sparsemax can bridge this trade-off, due to their ability to determine the number of concepts in a data-dependent manner.Specifically, we first explore a new class of SAEs based on the cross-attention architecture with the latent features as queries and the learnable dictionary as the key and value matrices. To encourage sparse pattern learning, we employ a sparsemax-based attention strategy that automatically infers a sparse set of concepts according to the complexity of each neuron, resulting in a more flexible and efficient activation function. Through comprehensive evaluation and visualization, we show that our approach successfully achieves lower reconstruction loss while producing high-quality concepts. Moreover, the sparsity level automatically determined by our approach can serve as tuning guidance to improve existing SAEs. The code is available at https://github.com/qyj-bkjx/Sparsemax-SAE.
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cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Vision-language models (VLMs) with dynamic resolution vision encoders achieve strong performance, but face significant efficiency challenges due to long input sequences. A common approach is to assess the importance of tokens and prune those that are less informative. Recent methods utilizing a small VLM to provide the importance map of visual tokens have outperformed existing rule-based and similarity-driven pruning approaches, particularly under high pruning ratios. However, directly using the small VLM remains unreliable, as it utilizes the aggregated visual attention weights as importance score, which can lead to noisy guidance if the generated tokens are incorrect.To address this, we invert the approach by having it detect non-informative visual tokens according to the user's input query. By adding a variational information bottleneck in the small VLM, we can approximate the entropy of each visual token as pruning guidance. Such a posteriori-guided pruning method allows the large VLM to retain its reasoning capacity with improved efficiency. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. With only 5% of visual tokens retained, the large VLM preserves 95% of its original performance, outperforming the state of the art by 8%.
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cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Taisuke Yasuda, Kyriakos Axiotis, Gang Fu, MohammadHossein Bateni, Vahab Mirrokni
Neural network pruning is a key technique towards engineering large yet scalable, interpretable, and generalizable models. Prior work on the subject has developed largely along two orthogonal directions: (1) differentiable pruning for efficiently and accurately scoring the importance of parameters, and (2) combinatorial optimization for efficiently searching over the space of sparse models. We unite the two approaches, both theoretically and empirically, to produce a coherent framework for structured neural network pruning in which differentiable pruning guides combinatorial optimization algorithms to select the most important sparse set of parameters. Theoretically, we show how many existing differentiable pruning techniques can be understood as nonconvex regularization for group sparse optimization, and prove that for a wide class of nonconvex regularizers, the global optimum is unique, group-sparse, and provably yields an approximate solution to a sparse convex optimization problem. The resulting algorithm that we propose, SequentialAttention++, advances the state of the art in large-scale neural network block-wise pruning tasks on the ImageNet and Criteo datasets.
Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows
Ze Liu, Yutong Lin, Yue Cao, Han Hu, Yixuan Wei, Zheng Zhang, Stephen Lin, Baining Guo
AI 速览：提出一种以移位窗口计算表示的层次化视觉Transformer，可作为通用视觉骨干网络，并在分类、检测和分割任务上取得作者报告的良好结果。
This paper presents a new vision Transformer, called Swin Transformer, that capably serves as a general-purpose backbone for computer vision. Challenges in adapting Transformer from language to vision arise from differences between the two domains, such as large variations in the scale of visual entities and the high resolution of pixels in images compared to words in text. To address these differences, we propose a hierarchical Transformer whose representation is computed with \textbf{S}hifted \textbf{win}dows. The shifted windowing scheme brings greater efficiency by limiting self-attention computation to non-overlapping local windows while also allowing for cross-window connection. This hierarchical architecture has the flexibility to model at various scales and has linear computational complexity with respect to image size. These qualities of Swin Transformer make it compatible with a broad range of vision tasks, including image classification (87.3 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K) and dense prediction tasks such as object detection (58.7 box AP and 51.1 mask AP on COCO test-dev) and semantic segmentation (53.5 mIoU on ADE20K val). Its performance surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin of +2.7 box AP and +2.6 mask AP on COCO, and +3.2 mIoU on ADE20K, demonstrating the potential of Transformer-based models as vision backbones. The hierarchical design and the shifted window approach also prove beneficial for all-MLP architectures. The code and models are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/microsoft/Swin-Transformer}.