Haolin Chen, Deon Metelski, Leon Qi, Tao Xia, Joonyul Lee, Steve Brown, Kevin Riley, Frank Wang 等 33 位作者
End-to-end automation of realistic healthcare operations stresses three capabilities underrepresented in current benchmarks: policy density, decisions must be grounded in a large library of medical, insurance, and operational rules; Multi-role composition: a single task requires the agent to play multiple roles with handoffs; and multilateral interaction: intermediate workflow steps are multi-turn dialogs, such as peer-to-peer review and patient outreach. We introduce $χ$-Bench, a benchmark of long-horizon healthcare workflows across three domains: provider prior authorization, payer utilization management, and care management. Each task hands the agent a clinical case in a high-fidelity simulator of 20 healthcare apps exposed via 87 MCP tools, which it must drive to a terminal status through tool calls and writing the role's artifacts, guided by a 1,290+ document managed-care operations handbook skill. Across 30 agent harness/models configurations, the best agent resolves only 28.0% of tasks, no agent clears 20% on strict pass^3, and executing all tasks in a single session slumps the performance to 3.8%. These results raise the hypothesis that similar gaps are likely to surface in other policy-dense, role-composed, irreversible enterprise domains.
Zhuoyun Li, Boxuan Wang, Jinwei Hu, Xiaowei Huang, Yi Dong
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used as cognitive interfaces that shape how users interpret evidence, communicate, and make decisions. As deployed systems become more multimodal, tool-using, and multi-agent, safety failures no longer arise only from isolated harmful outputs, but also from how agents update, store, and propagate epistemic commitments across retrieval, memory, tools, and peer communication. In this paper, we define belief as an engineering abstraction for evidence-based commitments that guide downstream action. Building on this view, we propose the Explicit Belief Multi-Agent System (EB-MAS), which externalizes belief states into a structured substrate, uses belief operators to propose candidate updates, and applies a Cognitive Firewall to bound or reject updates that are weakly evidenced but strongly driven by vulnerability cues. We also discuss the risk of group belief at the group level, including manufactured consensus, collusion, and cascading misinformation, and outline practical integration challenges around grounding, false positives, scalability, and ethical misuse. Therefore, scalable agent safety requires not only better output filtering or stronger base models, but also explicit interfaces for tracing, calibrating, and constraining belief revision at runtime.
Huayu Wang, Gyungmin Ko, Jung Heon Kim, Jia-Xian Jian, Dae Kon Kim, Dong Keon Lee, Hsiang-Wei Huang, Pau-Choo Chung 等 12 位作者
Reliable vocal-cord localization in emergency video laryngoscopy remains visually challenging due to rapid tissue deformation, specular highlights, and instrument occlusions. We propose Local Point Tracking (LPT), a robust framework that combines a single-frame detector, local point propagation, and stateless mask refinement. LPT follows a localize first, snap second pipeline. First, a single-frame semantic detector generates sparse anchors, within which LPT initializes local query points (SAM-supported by default, with a regular grid as fallback). A point-propagation module tracks these points through detector-missed frames and recovers temporal bounding boxes from their geometry. Second, because point-derived boxes can be loose around the visible boundary, a box-snap step refines the selected box to the target boundary. This decomposition keeps temporal state in local point coordinates rather than a stateful mask or whole-region representation, while the spatial refinement module handles single-frame boundary precision without feeding mask errors back into temporal memory. Extensive evaluations on two distinct datasets demonstrate that our proposed LPT method achieves strong overall performance against existing baselines, with the best mAP_50, success AUC, and missing rate on both datasets. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm that point tracking primarily enhances temporal tracking robustness, while box-snap refinement effectively improves boundary tightness.
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.
Chinmay Burgul, Xiaoming Zhao, Yewei Huang, Michalis Chatzispyrou, Marios Xanthidis, Ioannis Rekleitis, Alberto Quattrini Li
As expansion and scalability in underwater oper- ations becomes more important and challenging, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) become more relevant and the necessity for reliable autonomy more critical. A fundamental challenge in any autonomous underwater operation, from control to safe navigation and mapping, is state estimation; a notorious hard problem to address, especially in low visibility conditions. In this paper, we tackle this problem, by presenting SVIn+, a multi-sensor framework for robust state estimation of AUVs equipped with an IMU, cameras, a water-pressure sensor, a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL), and a compact 3D sonar. This framework extends an established open-source state-of-the-art visual-inertial SLAM, SVIn, by integrating water-pressure and DVL measurements into a tightly-coupled nonlinear optimiza- tion formulation resulting in improved estimates. To leverage the structural information of recently available 3D acoustic sonars while maintaining computational efficiency, we introduce a hierarchical architecture that incorporates estimates from a decoupled front-end via KISS-ICP, treated as relative pose factors within the factor graph. The proposed framework is validated through field deployments in a shipwreck and coral reef, demonstrating drift mitigation and global consistency. To support further research in underwater multi-modal fusion, the code and the datasets can be found on project website https://cmburgul.github.io/projects/svin+/ https://dartmouthrobotics.github.io/svin-plus
Zhanwei Wu, Jianhao Su, Brian Zhang, ShengTing Huang, Weidong Feng, Gang Liu, Zhiguo Li, Wei Huang 等 14 位作者
Deploying and optimizing a PyTorch inference project on a dedicated accelerator, especially an on-device NPU, requires more than using a framework device API as with CUDA. The project must be converted into hardware-runtime artifacts and adapted to the target toolchain and application interface. Differences in model formats, quantization flows, operator support, and toolchain interfaces create cross-layer problems spanning PyTorch/ONNX models, toolchains, runtimes, and device execution. LLM Agents can invoke tools to address such problems, but may drift because of insufficient domain knowledge, large configuration and repair spaces, or poor path selection. We propose AIPC (AI Porting & Conversion), an Agent method for deploying PyTorch inference projects. AIPC combines structured Skills with toolchain, runtime, and profiling evidence to drive cross-layer diagnosis and repair, organizing model adaptation, artifact building, on-target execution, accuracy repair, and performance optimization into one deployment flow. We evaluate AIPC on the on-device NPU path of Qualcomm QAIRT across vision, speech, LLM, and diffusion models. In two optimization cases, 6/7 Skill-arm Whisper-Small runs meet predefined accuracy and latency criteria versus 0/6 control runs, while YOLO-Worldv2 achieves a 2.791x end-to-end speedup versus 1.599x for the control. Under a pre-fixed deployment contract, Skill, tool permissions, and check conditions, some runs achieve zero in-run human intervention (0-HITL). We also examine Qwen3.8-27B as a locally deployable model for driving an Agent workflow.
Boxuan Wang, Zhuoyun Li, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Xiaowei Huang, Yi Dong
Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems can exhibit emergent behaviors through interaction, yet whether a similar phenomenon exists for reasoning alignment remains largely unexplored. We study whether agent interaction produces additional reference-grounded reasoning alignment beyond matched individual self-refinement, and introduce REMAP (Reference-Entailment-Matrix for Agentic Process), a framework that quantifies this effect through Semantic Coverage and interaction-specific alignment gains. Across diverse model families and two multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, we observe broadly positive interaction gains, particularly on reasoning content that depends on integrating evidence distributed across agents. These gains are consistently associated with independently measured peer-information recovery, while further analysis reveals composition-dependent heterogeneity effects and asymmetric information transfer across agent capability levels. Motivated by these findings, we further introduce a fact-level multi-agent communication framework that replaces full reasoning-trace exchange with compact, gap-aware, and selectively routed information. Our experiments show that compact fact exchange improves reasoning alignment and task performance while reducing communication overhead, whereas more selective communication exposes a trade-off between acquiring distributed information, retaining local content, and communication efficiency. Overall, our results show that collective emergent alignment can be quantified, linked to information-transfer patterns, and used to guide more effective multi-agent communication.
Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) have significantly improved robotic manipulation, yet deploying robots in the open world demands a higher level of autonomy beyond executing predefined tasks. Robot agents offer a promising paradigm for this transition, integrating task discovery, contextual reasoning, physical execution, and adaptive recovery into a closed interaction loop. However, existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated capabilities, failing to capture the complexity of open-world robot autonomy. We introduce RobotAgentBench (RAB), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating robot agents in realistic, open-world household environments. Through an agent-assisted, human-in-the-loop real-to-sim pipeline, RAB constructs 50 diverse household layouts with interactive objects and physically grounded tasks, encompassing 90 atomic tasks, 18 short-horizon tasks, 8 long-horizon tasks, and 4 open-ended scenarios. RAB provides a multi-level evaluation of robot agent capabilities: (1) task-level assessments systematically examine five complementary dimensions: task discovery, context reasoning, manipulation, failure recovery, and robustness; (2) scenario-level evaluation assesses how agents integrate these capabilities to autonomously fulfill high-level user needs. Furthermore, RAB enables systematic comparisons of standalone VLA/WAM models and diverse robot agent architectures under a unified planning-execution-verification framework. Extensive experiments reveal substantial gaps between manipulation and autonomy, demonstrate the advantages of agentic architectures and recursive self-improvement, and highlight the remaining challenges toward open-world robot autonomy.
Baishi Li, Ta Yu, Kelvin J.L. Koa National University of Singapore, Ke-Wei Huang
Natural Language Processing is rapidly evolving into a primary instrument for Computational Social Science, with researchers increasingly using embeddings to measure latent constructs such as novelty, creativity, and bias. However, this transition faces a fundamental validity challenge: the “Proxy Presumption,” or the reliance on geometric properties (e.g., cosine distance) as direct measures of social concepts. We argue that without explicit validation, unsupervised representations remain entangled mixtures of the target construct (C) and confounding attributes (Z) like topic, style, and authorship. To bridge the gap between semantic embeddings and valid social measures, we introduce the Construct Validity Protocol (CVP). Drawing on causal representation learning and psychometrics, the CVP offers a rigorous pipeline from conceptualization to quantitative verification. We further propose Counterfactual Neutralization, a novel method using LLMs to reduce confounding in embedding space. By providing a standardized Validity Suite—including tests for discriminant, incremental, and predictive validity—this work offers the community a toolkit to transform heuristic proxies into robust, scientifically defensible instruments.
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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
We introduce Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe), a training-and-inference framework designed to overcome a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. PaCoRe departs from the traditional sequential paradigm by driving TTC through massive parallel exploration coordinated via a message-passing architecture in multiple rounds. Each round launches many parallel reasoning trajectories, compacts their findings into context-bounded messages, and synthesizes these messages to guide the next round and ultimately produce the final answer. Trained end-to-end with large-scale, outcome-based reinforcement learning, the model masters the synthesis abilities required by PaCoRe and scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. The approach yields strong improvements across diverse domains and notably pushes reasoning beyond frontier systems in mathematics: an 8B model reaches 94.5% on HMMT 2025, surpassing GPT-5’s 93.2% by scaling effective TTC to roughly two million tokens. We open-source model checkpoints, training data, and the full inference pipeline to accelerate follow-up work.
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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
Boxuan Wang, Zhuoyun Li, Xinmiao Huang, Xiaowei Huang University of Liverpool, Yi Dong
This paper primarily demonstrates a method to quantitatively assess the alignment between multi-step, structured reasoning in large language models and human preferences. We introduce the Alignment Score, a semantic-level metric that compares a model-produced chain of thought traces with a human-preferred reference by constructing semantic-entropy-based matrices over intermediate steps and measuring their divergence. Our analysis shows that Alignment Score tracks task accuracy across models and hop depths, and peaks at 2-hop reasoning. Empirical results further indicate that misalignment at greater reasoning depths is driven mainly by alignment errors such as thematic shift and redundant reasoning. Viewing chain sampling as drawing from a distribution over reasoning paths, we empirically demonstrate a strong and consistent correlation between Alignment Score and accuracy, readability, and coherence, supporting its use as a diagnostic signal. The code is available.
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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
Ziwei Huang, Ying Shu Alibaba Group, Fanghao Alibaba Group, Quanyu Long, Wenya Wang Nanyang Technological University, Qiushi Guo Alibaba Group, Tiezheng Ge Alibaba Group, Leilei Gan Zhejiang University
Subject-driven image generation models face a fundamental trade-off between identity preservation (fidelity) and prompt adherence (editability). While online reinforcement learning (RL), specifically GPRO, offers a promising solution, we find that a naive application of GRPO leads to competitive degradation, as the simple linear aggregation of rewards with static weights causes conflicting gradient signals and a misalignment with the temporal dynamics of the diffusion process. To overcome these limitations, we propose Customized-GRPO, a novel framework featuring two key innovations: (i) Synergy-Aware Reward Shaping (SARS), a non-linear mechanism that explicitly penalizes conflicted reward signals and amplifies synergistic ones, providing a sharper and more decisive gradient. (ii) Time-Aware Dynamic Weighting (TDW), which aligns the optimization pressure with the model’s temporal dynamics by prioritizing prompt-following in the early, identity preservation in the later. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms naive GRPO baselines, successfully mitigating competitive degradation. Our model achieves a superior balance, generating images that both preserve key identity features and accurately adhere to complex textual prompts.
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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
Ziqiao Xi, Shuang Liang, Qi Liu University of California, San Diego, Jiaqing Zhang, Letian Peng, Fang Nan University of California, San Diego, Meshal Nayim, Tianhui Zhang University of California, San Diego 等 12 位作者
To close the gap between LLM-based agents and humans in planning and reasoning, agents need large-scale, diverse environments for continuous learning—yet building such environments is itself prohibitively expensive. We present C-World, an environment creation system that enables users to build agent environments on demand. We define a complete agent environment through four components: an Action Space of 5,571 format-unified tools across 204 common applications, a Task Distribution engine that synthesizes long-horizon workflows with wild constraints, a Transition Function implemented as a state controller that injects realistic failures and perturbations, and a Reward Signal combining verifiable metrics with LLM-based judgment. C-World operates in two modes: a realistic mode grounded in live API execution, and a synthesized mode powered by the World Engine, which approximates tool behavior without live service access, enabling scalable environment creation—including environments for domains and tools that do not yet exist in the real world. Evaluation of nine state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that planning ability is uniformly strong but execution remains the bottleneck, and that constraint following—not tool invocation—is the dominant failure mode. The World Engine achieves Spearman \rho = 0.883 ranking correlation with real execution, and fine-tuning on just 1,170 C-World trajectories outperforms baselines trained on 119k samples, demonstrating C-World’s dual value as a rigorous evaluation environment and a scalable data engine. Our code and data are available at https://ziqiao-git.github.io/C-World/.
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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
Yandi Wang, Libin Zhan Zhejiang University, Ziwei Huang, Tiancheng Luo, Yuxuan Jiang, Wang Dong Zhejiang University, Leilei Gan Zhejiang University, Jun Chen Zhejiang University
Extracting structured information from visual documents (Visual Information Extraction, VIE) is a cornerstone of business automation. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities, existing benchmarks suffer from critical limitations in scale and realism, lack semantic granularity, and fail to cover diverse document types. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReceiptBench, a large-scale, human-annotated benchmark consisting of 10k diverse receipts, organizing information extraction into four hierarchical sub-tasks: (1) Basic Perception for raw text spotting, (2) Format Normalization for strictly following standardization instructions, (3) Semantic Reasoning for inferring implicit attributes from context, and (4) Structure Parsing for handling nested line items. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage training framework incorporating Metric-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which translates rigorous evaluation constraints into reinforcement learning signals to enhance structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields state-of-the-art performance, surpassing leading proprietary models on complex reasoning tasks. We release our datasets and code at https://github.com/wwwT0ri/ReceiptBench.
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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
Jinwei Hu, Xinmiao Huang, Youcheng Sun Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and The University of Manchester, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang University of Liverpool
As large language models (LLMs) transition to autonomous agents synthesizing real-time information, their reasoning capabilities introduce an unexpected attack surface. This paper introduces a novel threat where colluding agents steer victim beliefs using only truthful evidence fragments distributed through public channels, without relying on covert communications, backdoors, or falsified documents. By exploiting LLMs’ overthinking tendency, we formalize the first cognitive collusion attack and propose Generative Montage: a Writer-Editor-Director framework that constructs deceptive narratives through adversarial debate and coordinated posting of evidence fragments, causing victims to internalize and propagate fabricated conclusions. To study this risk, we develop CoPHEME, a dataset derived from real-world rumor events, and simulate attacks across diverse LLM families. Our results show pervasive vulnerability across 14 LLM families: attack success rates reach 74.4% for proprietary models and 70.6% for open-weights models. Counterintuitively, stronger reasoning capabilities increase susceptibility, with reasoning-specialized models showing higher attack success than base models or prompts. Furthermore, these false beliefs then cascade to downstream judges, achieving over 60% deception rates, highlighting a socio-technical vulnerability in how LLM-based agents interact with dynamic information environments.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表