MetaRefine: Score Refinement with Multi-Level Features for Image Assessment
Chuanzhi Xu, Chengkun Yue, Haolan Guo, Xuanhua Yin, Boyu Wei, Zihan Deng, Qiang Qu, Weidong Cai
AI 速览：提出一种元数据感知的轻量分数精炼架构，在不改动原评分流程的前提下，利用原始图像几何信息与多层级视觉特征对已有模型的分数进行修正。
An image's original dimensions, aspect ratio, and composition provide important cues that can affect its technical and aesthetic quality. Image assessment methods use resizing, cropping, padding, or patch sampling to accommodate different input sizes. However, these operations can alter or obscure original geometric and compositional cues. Existing assessment models also encode rich multi-level visual evidence that can be further extracted and exploited to improve existing models. This motivates us to combine visual evidence with original-image geometry for score refinement without changing the original scoring pipelines. In this paper, we introduce MetaRefine, a metadata-aware score refinement architecture whose lightweight residual heads predict score corrections from geometry, multi-level visual features, and the frozen model's original score. Across 100 configurations on 21 datasets, MetaRefine improves PLCC in 88 configurations and SRCC in 85, with average relative gains of 7.55% and 7.10%, respectively. It reduces MAE in 90 configurations and RMSE in 89, with average relative reductions of 23.27% and 21.93%, respectively. The median parameter overhead is only 1.11%. MetaRefine can further improve state-of-the-art (SOTA) assessment models on multiple benchmarks.
Event cameras capture visual brightness changes under challenging lighting conditions. However, traditional event-based image reconstruction targets grayscale intensity and produces images without scene color. Color distinguishes surfaces with similar intensity. Reconstructing color from events can reveal appearance differences that reconstructed grayscale images cannot express. Although monochrome event cameras do not directly measure color, their event-triggering patterns depend on surface reflectance, illumination, and the sensor's spectral response. These patterns may contain cues that support color reconstruction. In this paper, we present EventSeeColor, which uses event-reconstructed grayscale and aligned events to jointly guide a diffusion colorizer. Grayscale-derived semantic context supports color inference, while region-balanced chroma supervision and local RGB refinement improve color distribution, brightness, and texture. In the combined evaluation on two real event datasets, EventSeeColor achieves the best structural similarity, learned perceptual scores, and chromatic-region color difference among the external methods.
The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed the development of autonomous agents capable of navigating complex environments. However, existing evaluations primarily adopt a deductive paradigm, where agents execute tasks based on explicitly provided rules and static goals, often within limited planning horizons. Crucially, this neglects the inductive necessity for agents to discover latent transition laws from experience autonomously, which is the cornerstone for enabling agentic foresight and sustaining strategic coherence. To bridge this gap, we introduce OdysseyArena, which re-centers agent evaluation on long-horizon, active, and inductive interactions. We formalize and instantiate four primitives, translating abstract transition dynamics into concrete interactive environments. Building upon this, we establish OdysseyArena-Lite for standardized benchmarking, providing a set of 120 tasks to measure an agent's inductive efficiency and long-horizon discovery. Pushing further, we introduce OdysseyArena-Challenge to stress-test agent stability across extreme interaction horizons (e.g., > 200 steps). Extensive experiments on 15+ leading LLMs reveal that even frontier models exhibit a deficiency in inductive scenarios, identifying a critical bottleneck in the pursuit of autonomous discovery in complex environments. Project homepage: https://os-copilot.github.io/OdysseyArena-Home/
Yao Huang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yu Wang, Zhitong Zhu, Dingcheng Duan, Hao Li, Shangzhi Xu, Yifan Wang 等 17 位作者
As frontier language models grow increasingly capable and autonomous, independent third-party evaluations are critical for characterizing their systemic safety risks. While closed-source releases are routinely accompanied by comprehensive system cards, open-weight models receive less scrutiny regarding frontier risks. To address this gap, we present an independent safety evaluation of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017, the latest version of V4.1 Flash that departs from V4 with a new architecture, scaled-up training, and strong agentic capabilities. Drawing on the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, we evaluate the model across 34 benchmarks, including 5 in-house suites, spanning evaluation integrity, loss of control, and harmful manipulation. Conforming to the AEF-1 standard, we compare V4.1 Flash-1017 against V4.1 Flash, earlier DeepSeek V4 models, and leading closed-source systems (GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Gemini 3.8 Flash). Overall, V4.1 Flash-1017 shows substantial safety improvements over the V4 generation and approaches or matches leading closed-source baselines on several dimensions, while still exhibiting notable behaviors that warrant continued attention. Building on our findings, we highlight three key observations and recommendations. First, because safety can shift and even regress across minor updates, developers should integrate safety evaluation into incremental releases. Second, as final-turn outputs and end-state checks alone cannot reliably detect loss-of-control behaviors, deployments require process-level observability across both reasoning traces and action logs. Third, because public benchmarks elicit strong evaluation awareness and face data contamination risks, developing private benchmarks is essential for trustworthy frontier evaluation.
Agent Skills allow LLM agents to combine reusable capabilities, but checking each Skill in isolation cannot rule out policy violations when they are composed. We term such failures Conflict of Skills (CoS): artifacts or assessment signals produced for one purpose may be reused downstream without preserving the restrictions or authorization needed for their new use. Using controlled executions of publicly available Skills and matched single-Skill controls, we identify four recurring mechanisms behind CoS. Building on these findings, we introduce the Conflict of Skills Attack (CoSA), which adds locally admitted Skills to an existing pool to supply missing business operations (capability supplementation) or reshape artifact exchange, decision reuse, and target/action bindings (relationship reshaping). CoSA leaves existing Skills and runtime permissions unchanged. To evaluate this threat under autonomous Skill selection, we introduce CoSA-Bench, built from real-world Skills and controlled services, with 288 tasks across recruiting, finance, IT, and business, covering data leakage, unauthorized state modification, and unsafe execution. Across five LLMs and three agent harnesses, additions capped at 5% of each original pool raise the policy-violation rate from 35.02% to 58.45%, an increase of 23.43 percentage points. Trace analysis links compliant-to-violating transitions to cross-Skill dependencies involving the additions. Finally, we develop a lightweight harness-level guard that checks information flow and authorization before consequential actions. On OpenClaw recruiting tasks across five models, the guard reduces violations from 65.28% to 6.67%, while policy-compliant task completion on matched benign controls changes from 66.67% to 65.00%.
Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin national university of singaore, National University of Singapore, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Shanghai AI Laboratory, Qiushi Sun University of Hong Kong, Zehao Li University of Science and Technology of China, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu 等 15 位作者
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced Computer-Using Agents (CUAs), current agentic frameworks struggle with robustness in novel domains and long-horizon workflows due to the absence of visual-aware tutorial retrieval and the lack of granular control over historical visual context curation and pruning. To bridge these gaps, we introduce OS-Symphony, a holistic framework that comprises an Orchestrator coordinating two key innovations for robust automation: (1) a Reflection-Memory Agent that utilizes milestone-driven long-term memory to enable trajectory-level self-correction, effectively mitigating visual context loss in long-horizon tasks; (2) Versatile Tool Agents featuring a Multimodal Searcher that adopts a “SeeAct” paradigm to navigate a browser-based sandbox to synthesize live, visually aligned tutorials, thereby resolving fidelity issues in unseen scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across varying model scales, establishing new state-of-the-art results on three online benchmarks, notably achieving 65.84% on OSWorld. All research assets will be made publicly available.
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cs.CL · cs.AI · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Hang Yan Xi'an Jiaotong University, Fangzhi Xu Xi'an Jiaotong University, Rongman Xu School of Computer Science and Technology and School of Mathmatics and Statistics, Yifei Li, Jian Zhang, Haoran Luo Nanyang Technological University, Xiaobao Wu Shanghai Jiaotong University, Anh Tuan Luu Nanyang Technological University 等 11 位作者
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on reasoning-intensive tasks, yet optimizing their reasoning efficiency remains an open challenge. While Test-Time Scaling (TTS) improves reasoning quality, it often leads to overthinking—wasting tokens on redundant computations. This work investigates how to efficiently and adaptively guide LLM TTS without additional training. Inspired by the concept of momentum in physics, we propose Momentum Uncertainty-guided Reasoning (MUR), which dynamically allocates thinking budgets to critical reasoning steps by tracking and aggregating step-wise uncertainty over time. To support flexible inference-time control, we introduce -control, a simple mechanism that tunes the reasoning budget via a single hyperparameter. We provide in-depth theoretical proof to support the superiority of MUR in terms of stability and biases. MUR is comprehensively evaluated against various TTS methods across four challenging benchmarks (MATH-500, AIME24, AIME25, and GPQA-diamond) using different sizes of recent Qwen3 models (1.7B, 4B, and 8B). Results demonstrate that MUR reduces computation by over 45% on average while improving accuracy by 0.33–3.46%.
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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
Causal reasoning in natural language requires identifying relevant variables, understanding their interactions, and reasoning about effects and interventions, often under noisy or ambiguous conditions. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general reasoning abilities, they struggle to disentangle correlation from causation, particularly when observations are partially incorrect or irrelevant information is present. In this work, we introduce NoisyCausal, a new benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning under structured noise. Each instance is generated from a ground-truth causal graph and contextualized with a natural language scenario by injecting controllable forms of noise, such as irrelevant distractors, value perturbations, confounding, and partial observability. Moreover, we propose a modular reasoning framework that combines LLMs with explicit causal structure to address these challenges. Our method prompts the LLM to extract variables, construct a causal graph from context, and then reformulates the reasoning task as a structured prompt grounded in this graph. Rather than relying on statistical patterns alone, the LLM is guided by symbolic structure, enabling more interpretable and robust inference. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms standard prompting and reasoning baselines on NoisyCausal. Furthermore, it generalizes well to external benchmarks such as Cladder without task-specific tuning. Our findings highlight the importance of combining causal abstractions with language-driven reasoning to achieve faithful and robust causal understanding 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
Qiushi Sun University of Hong Kong, Mukai Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Zhihui Xie University of Hong Kong, Fangzhi Xu Xi'an Jiaotong University, Zhangyue Yin, Kanzhi Cheng Nanjing University, Zehao Li University of Science and Technology of China 等 14 位作者
Computer-using agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like capabilities in operating digital environments like mobile platforms. While these agents hold great promise for advancing digital automation, their potential for unsafe operations, such as system compromise and privacy leakage, is raising significant concerns. Detecting these safety concerns across the vast and complex operational space of mobile environments presents a formidable challenge that remains critically underexplored. To establish a foundation for mobile agent safety research, we introduce MobileRisk-Live, a dynamic sandbox environment accompanied by a safety detection benchmark comprising realistic trajectories with fine-grained annotations. Built upon this, we propose OS-Sentinel, a novel hybrid safety detection framework that synergistically combines a Formal Verifier for detecting explicit system-level violations with a VLM-based Contextual Judge for assessing contextual risks and agent actions. Experiments show that achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. Further analysis provides critical insights that foster the development of safer and more reliable autonomous mobile agents. Our code, environment, and data are available at https://qiushisun.github.io/OS-Sentinel-Home/.
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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
Jiajia Li, Weizhi Xue, Yao Yao, Qiwei Li, Chong Chen, Zuchao Li Wuhan University, Ping Wang Wuhan University, Hai Zhao Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in general tasks but struggle with specialized, structured cultural symbols. We introduce BoYaEval, the first comprehensive benchmark dedicated to deciphering diverse Ancient Chinese musical notations, including five types of ancient Chinese music notation systems. These systems utilize unique spatial layouts and specialized ideograms to encode pitch and intricate playing techniques. BoYaEval comprises 3,175 high-quality images across these notation styles and establishes a three-tier evaluation: Structural Parsing (symbol recognition), Instructional Translation (technique mapping), and Musical Reasoning (melody derivation). We evaluate 21 leading MLLMs. Results indicate that while models perform adequately in basic recognition, they fail in cross-system compositional logic, scoring only around 27% on reasoning tasks. BoYaEval highlights the limitations of current MLLMs in processing diverse spatial-symbolic dependencies, bridging the gap between ancient wisdom and modern AI for digitizing intangible cultural heritage. The BoYaEval benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MYTH-Lab/BoYaEval.
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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