The cross-entropy scaling law has long served as a key tool for guiding the development of large language models. It shows that cross-entropy loss decreases in a predictable power-law rate as the model size increases. However, recent evidence indicates that this law breaks down at very large scales: the loss decreases more slowly than expected, which causes significant trouble for developing large language models. In this paper, we hypothesize that the root cause lies in the fact that cross-entropy itself does not truly scale; instead, only one of its hidden components does. To investigate this, we introduce a novel decomposition of cross-entropy into three parts: Error-Entropy, Self-Alignment, and Confidence. We show both theoretically and empirically that this decomposition precisely captures the training dynamics and optimization objectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets and 32 models spanning five orders of magnitude in size, we find that only error-entropy follows a robust power-law scaling, while the other two terms remain largely invariant. Moreover, error-entropy constitutes the dominant share of cross-entropy in small models but diminishes in proportion as models grow larger. This explains why the cross-entropy scaling law appears accurate at small scales but fails at very large ones. Our findings establish the error-entropy scaling law as a more accurate description of model behavior. We believe it will have wide applications in the training, understanding, and future development of large language models.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve problem-solving and provide seemingly transparent explanations. However, growing evidence shows that CoT often fail to faithfully represent the underlying reasoning process, raising concerns about their reliability in high-risk applications. Although prior studies have focused on mechanism-level analyses showing that CoTs can be unfaithful, they leave open the practical challenge of deciding whether a specific trajectory is faithful to the internal reasoning of the model. To address this gap, we introduce FaithCoT-Bench, a unified benchmark for instance-level CoT unfaithfulness detection. Our framework establishes a rigorous task formulation that formulates unfaithfulness detection as a discriminative decision problem, and provides FINE-CoT (Faithfulness instance evaluation for Chain-of-Thought), an expert-annotated collection of over 1,000 trajectories generated by four representative LLMs across four domains, including more than 300 unfaithful instances with fine-grained causes and step-level evidence. We further conduct a systematic evaluation of eleven representative detection methods spanning counterfactual, logit-based, and LLM-as-judge paradigms, deriving empirical insights that clarify the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches and reveal the increased challenges of detection in knowledge-intensive domains and with more advanced models. To the best of our knowledge, FaithCoT-Bench establishes the first comprehensive benchmark for instance-level CoT faithfulness, setting a solid basis for future research toward more interpretable and trustworthy reasoning in LLMs.

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is an emerging paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, standard on-policy training discards rollout experiences after a single update, leading to computational inefficiency and instability. While prior work on RL has highlighted the benefits of reusing past experience, the role of experience characteristics in shaping learning dynamics of large reasoning models remains underexplored. In this paper, we are the first to investigate what makes a reasoning experience valuable and identify rollout correctness and entropy as effective indicators of experience value. Based on these insights, we propose ExGRPO (Experiential Group Relative Policy Optimization), a framework that organizes and prioritizes valuable experiences, and employs a mixed-policy objective to balance exploration with experience exploitation. Experiments on five backbone models (1.5B-8B parameters) show that ExGRPO consistently improves reasoning performance on mathematical/general benchmarks, with an average gain of +3.5/7.6 points over on-policy RLVR. Moreover, ExGRPO stabilizes training on both stronger and weaker models where on-policy methods fail. These results highlight principled experience management as a key ingredient for efficient and scalable RLVR.

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains understudied. As a result, existing implementations often resort to conservative hyperparameter choices to ensure stability, which requires more training samples and increases computational costs. Hence, developing models for reliably tracking the underlying optimization dynamics and leveraging them into training enables more sample-efficient regimes and further unleashes scalable post-training. We address this gap by formalizing the stochastic optimization problem of policy gradients with explicit consideration of second-order geometry. We propose a tractable computational framework that tracks and leverages curvature information during policy updates. We further employ this framework to design interventions in the optimization process through data selection. The resultant algorithm, Curvature-Aware Policy Optimization (CAPO), identifies samples that contribute to unstable updates and masks them out. Theoretically, we establish monotonic improvement guarantees under realistic assumptions. On standard math reasoning benchmarks, we empirically show that CAPO ensures stable updates under aggressive learning regimes where baselines catastrophically fail. With minimal intervention (rejecting fewer than 8% of tokens), CAPO achieves up to 30x improvement in sample efficiency over standard GRPO for LLM reasoning.

Cultural awareness capabilities have emerged as a critical capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, current benchmarks lack progressed difficulty in their task design and are deficient in cross-lingual tasks. Moreover, current benchmarks often use real-world images. Each real-world image typically contains one culture, making these benchmarks relatively easy for MLLMs. Based on this, we propose C$^3$B (Comics Cross-Cultural Benchmark), a novel multicultural, multitask and multilingual cultural awareness capabilities benchmark. C$^3$B comprises over 2000 images and over 18000 QA pairs, constructed on three tasks with progressed difficulties, from basic visual recognition to higher-level cultural conflict understanding, and finally to cultural content generation. We conducted evaluations on 11 open-source MLLMs, revealing a significant performance gap between MLLMs and human performance. The gap demonstrates that C$^3$B poses substantial challenges for current MLLMs, encouraging future research to advance the cultural awareness capabilities of MLLMs.

Ensuring native-like quality of large language model (LLM) responses across many languages is challenging. To address this, we introduce MENLO, a framework that operationalizes the evaluation of native-like response quality based on audience design-inspired mechanisms. Using MENLO, we create a dataset of 6,423 human-annotated prompt-response preference pairs covering four quality dimensions with high inter-annotator agreement in 47 language varieties. Our evaluation reveals that zero-shot LLM judges benefit significantly from pairwise evaluation and our structured annotation rubrics, yet they still underperform human annotators on our dataset. We demonstrate substantial improvements through fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, reward shaping, and multi-task learning approaches. Additionally, we show that RL-trained judges can serve as generative reward models to enhance LLMs' multilingual proficiency, though discrepancies with human judgment remain. Our findings suggest promising directions for scalable multilingual evaluation and preference alignment. We release our dataset and evaluation framework to support further research in multilingual LLM evaluation (https://huggingface.co/datasets/facebook/menlo).

Classical influence functions face significant challenges when applied to deep neural networks, primarily due to non-invertible Hessians and high-dimensional parameter spaces. We propose the local Bayesian influence function (BIF), an extension of classical influence functions that replaces Hessian inversion with loss landscape statistics that can be estimated via stochastic-gradient MCMC sampling. This Hessian-free approach captures higher-order interactions among parameters and scales efficiently to neural networks with billions of parameters. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on predicting retraining experiments.

We present Stylos, a single-forward 3D Gaussian framework for 3D style transfer that operates on unposed content, from a single image to a multi-view collection, conditioned on a separate reference style image. Stylos synthesizes a stylized 3D Gaussian scene without per-scene optimization or precomputed poses, achieving geometry-aware, view-consistent stylization that generalizes to unseen categories, scenes, and styles. At its core, Stylos adopts a Transformer backbone with two pathways: geometry predictions retain self-attention to preserve geometric fidelity, while style is injected via global cross-attention to enforce visual consistency across views. With the addition of a voxel-based 3D style loss that aligns aggregated scene features to style statistics, Stylos enforces view-consistent stylization while preserving geometry. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that Stylos delivers high-quality zero-shot stylization, highlighting the effectiveness of global style-content coupling, the proposed 3D style loss, and the scalability of our framework from single view to large-scale multi-view settings. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HanzhouLiu/Stylos.

Recently, we have witnessed great progress in image editing with natural language instructions. Several closed-source models like GPT-Image-1, Seedream, and Google-Nano-Banana have shown highly promising progress. However, the open-source models are still lagging. The main bottleneck is the lack of a reliable reward model to scale up high-quality synthetic training data. To address this critical bottleneck, we built EditReward, trained with our new large-scale human preference dataset, meticulously annotated by trained experts following a rigorous protocol containing over 200K preference pairs. EditReward demonstrates superior alignment with human preferences in instruction-guided image editing tasks. Experiments show that EditReward achieves state-of-the-art human correlation on established benchmarks such as GenAI-Bench, AURORA-Bench, ImagenHub, and our new EditReward-Bench, outperforming a wide range of VLM-as-judge models. Furthermore, we use EditReward to select a high-quality subset from the existing noisy ShareGPT-4o-Image dataset. We train Step1X-Edit on the selected subset, which shows significant improvement over training on the full set. This demonstrates EditReward's ability to serve as a reward model to scale up high-quality training data for image editing. Furthermore, its strong alignment suggests potential for advanced applications like reinforcement learning-based post-training and test-time scaling of image editing models. EditReward with its training dataset will be released to help the community build more high-quality image editing training datasets.

Autonomous exploration and object search in unknown indoor environments remain challenging for multi-robot systems (MRS). Traditional approaches often rely on greedy frontier assignment strategies with limited inter-robot coordination. In this work, we present Coordinated Multi-Robot Exploration and Search using Vision Language Models (COMRES-VLM), a novel framework that leverages Vision Language Models (VLMs) for intelligent coordination of MRS tasked with efficient exploration and target object search. COMRES-VLM integrates real-time frontier cluster extraction and topological skeleton analysis with VLM reasoning over shared occupancy maps, robot states, and optional natural language priors, in order to generate globally consistent waypoint assignments. Extensive experiments in large-scale simulated indoor environments with up to six robots demonstrate that COMRES-VLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art coordination methods, including Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) and Voronoi-based planners, achieving 10.2\% faster exploration completion and 55.7\% higher object search efficiency. Notably, COMRES-VLM enables natural language-based object search capabilities, allowing human operators to provide high-level semantic guidance that traditional algorithms cannot interpret.

Modern applications increasingly involve many heterogeneous input streams, such as clinical sensors, wearable device data, imaging, and text, each with distinct measurement models, sampling rates, and noise characteristics. We define this as massively multimodal setting, where each sensor constitutes a separate modality. As modality counts grow, capturing their complex, time-varying interactions such as delayed physiological cascades between sensors, has becomes essential yet challenging. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are naturally suited for this setting since their sparse routing mechanism enables efficient scaling across many modalities. However, existing MoE architectures route tokens based on similarity alone, overlooking the rich temporal dependencies across modalities: this prevents the model from capturing delayed cross-modal effects, leading to suboptimal expert specialization and reduced accuracy. We propose a framework that explicitly quantifies temporal dependencies between modality pairs across multiple discrete time intervals, defined as delays between an event in one input stream and its manifested effect in another, and uses these to guide MoE routing. A interaction-aware router dispatches tokens to specialized experts based on interaction type. This principled routing enables experts to learn generalizable interaction-processing skills. Experiments across healthcare, activity recognition, and affective computing benchmarks demonstrate substantial performance gains and interpretable routing patterns aligned with domain knowledge.

Calibrated confidence estimates are necessary for large language model (LLM) outputs to be trusted by human users. While LLMs can express their confidence in human-interpretable ways, verbalized LLM-generated confidence scores have empirically been found to be miscalibrated, reporting high confidence on instances with low accuracy and thereby harming trust and safety. We hypothesize that this overconfidence often stems from a given LLM's heightened suggestibility when faced with claims that it encodes little information about; we empirically validate this hypothesis, finding more suggestibility on lower-accuracy claims. Building on this finding, we introduce Distractor-Normalized Coherence (DINCO), which estimates and accounts for an LLM's suggestibility bias by having the model verbalize its confidence independently across several self-generated distractors (i.e. alternative claims), and normalizes by the total verbalized confidence. To further improve calibration, we leverage generator-validator disagreement, augmenting normalized validator confidence with a consistency-based estimate of generator confidence. Here, we frame the popular approach of self-consistency as leveraging coherence across sampled generations, and normalized verbalized confidence as leveraging coherence across validations on incompatible claims, allowing us to integrate these complementary dimensions of coherence into DINCO. Moreover, our analysis shows that DINCO provides less saturated -- and therefore more usable -- confidence estimates, and that further sampling alone cannot close the gap between DINCO and baselines, with DINCO at 10 inference calls outperforming self-consistency at 100.

We present SpinBench, a cognitively grounded diagnostic benchmark for evaluating spatial reasoning in vision language models (VLMs). SpinBench is designed around the core challenge of spatial reasoning: perspective taking, the ability to reason about how scenes and object relations change under viewpoint transformation. Since perspective taking requires multiple cognitive capabilities, such as recognizing objects across views, relative positions grounding, and mentally simulating transformations, SpinBench introduces a set of fine-grained diagnostic categories. Our categories target translation, rotation, object relative pose, and viewpoint change, and are progressively structured so that single-object simpler tasks scaffold toward the most demanding multi-object perspective-taking setting. We evaluate 43 state-of-the-art VLMs, both proprietary and open source. Results reveal systematic weaknesses: strong egocentric bias, poor rotational understanding, and inconsistencies under symmetrical and syntactic reformulations. Scaling analysis shows both smooth improvements and emergent capabilities. While human subjects achieve high accuracy (91.2\%), task difficulty as measured by human response time shows strong correlation with VLM accuracy, indicating that SpinBench captures spatial reasoning challenges shared across humans and VLMs. We believe SpinBench provides critical insights into spatial reasoning in VLMs and highlights key gaps in their ability to reason about physical space. Our website can be found at https://spinbench25.github.io/.

Although Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have progressed in solving complex problems, their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often contains harmful content that can persist even when the final responses appear safe. We show that this issue still remains in existing methods which overlook the unique significance of safe reasoning, undermining their trustworthiness and posing potential risks in applications if unsafe reasoning is accessible for and exploited by malicious users. We therefore shift our focus to aligning the safety of reasoning itself in this paper and explore process supervision as the solution. However, simply rewarding safe reasoning proves inadequate due to low rollout diversity and limited training signals. To tackle this challenge, we first delve into the characteristics of safe reasoning and uncover several critical insights that 1) safe reasoning is often consolidated by a few critical steps of safety triggers; 2) compliance cues strongly correlate with unsafe continuations; and 3) corrective interventions reliably steer unsafe trajectories towards safer traces. Motivated by these, we propose Intervened Preference Optimization (IPO), an alignment method that enforces safe reasoning by substituting compliance steps with safety triggers and constructing pairs for preference learning with strong signals. Experiments on jailbreak and adversarial safety benchmarks demonstrate that IPO remarkably improves overall safety regarding both reasoning and responses, outperforming SFT-based and RL-based baselines with a relative reduction of over 30% in harmfulness, while preserving excellent performance across diverse reasoning tasks. The results highlight the importance of explicit alignment for reasoning and provide a practical path to safer LRMs.

Advanced deep learning-based approaches have been actively applied to forecast the spatiotemporal physical dynamics governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), which acts as a critical procedure in tackling many science and engineering problems. As real-world physical environments like PDE system parameters are always capricious, how to generalize across unseen out-of-distribution (OOD) forecasting scenarios using limited training data is of great importance. To bridge this barrier, existing methods focus on discovering domain-generalizable representations across various PDE dynamics trajectories. However, their zero-shot OOD generalization capability remains deficient, since extra test-time samples for domain-specific adaptation are still required. This is because the fundamental physical invariance in PDE dynamical systems are yet to be investigated or integrated. To this end, we first explicitly define a two-fold PDE invariance principle, which points out that ingredient operators and their composition relationships remain invariant across different domains and PDE system evolution. Next, to capture this two-fold PDE invariance, we propose a physics-guided invariant learning method termed iMOOE, featuring an Invariance-aligned Mixture Of Operator Expert architecture and a frequency-enriched invariant learning objective. Extensive experiments across simulated benchmarks and real-world applications validate iMOOE's superior in-distribution performance and zero-shot generalization capabilities on diverse OOD forecasting scenarios.

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is attracting growing interest, driven by practical constraints in real-world applications, the complexity of LLM-RL infrastructure, and the need for further innovations of RL methodologies. While classic REINFORCE and its modern variants like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) are typically regarded as on-policy algorithms with limited tolerance of off-policyness, we present in this work a first-principles derivation for group-relative REINFORCE -- a REINFORCE variant that uses the within-group mean reward as the baseline for advantage calculation -- without assuming a specific training data distribution, showing that it admits a native off-policy interpretation. This perspective yields two general principles for adapting REINFORCE to truly off-policy settings: regularizing policy updates, and actively shaping the data distribution. Our analysis demystifies some myths about the roles of importance sampling and clipping in GRPO, unifies and reinterprets two recent algorithms -- Online Policy Mirror Descent and Asymmetric REINFORCE -- as regularized forms of the REINFORCE loss, and offers theoretical justification for seemingly heuristic data-weighting strategies. Our findings lead to actionable insights that are validated with extensive empirical studies, and open up new opportunities for principled algorithm design in off-policy RL for LLMs. Source code for this work is available at https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/main/examples/rec_gsm8k.

Modern large language models increasingly use smooth activation functions such as GELU or SiLU, allowing negative pre-activations to carry both signal and gradient. Nevertheless, many neuron-level interpretability analyses have historically focused on large positive activations, often implicitly treating the negative region as less informative, a carryover from the ReLU-era. We challenge this assumption and ask whether and how negative pre-activations are leveraged by models. We address this question by studying a sparse subpopulation of Wasserstein neurons whose output distributions deviate strongly from a Gaussian baseline and that functionally differentiate similar inputs. We show that this negative region plays an active role rather than reflecting a mere gradient optimization side effect. A minimal, sign-specific intervention that zeroes only the negative pre-activations of a small set of Wasserstein neurons substantially increases perplexity and sharply degrades grammatical performance on BLiMP and TSE, whereas both random and perplexity-matched ablations of many more non-Wasserstein neurons in their negative pre-activations leave grammatical performance largely intact. Conversely, on a suite of non-grammatical benchmarks, the perplexity-matched control ablation is more damaging than the Wasserstein neuron ablation, yielding a double dissociation between syntax and other capabilities. Part-of-speech analysis localizes the excess surprisal to syntactic scaffolding tokens, layer-specific interventions show that small local degradations accumulate across depth, and training-dynamics analysis reveals that the same sign-specific ablation becomes more harmful as Wasserstein neurons emerge and stabilize. Together, these results identify negative pre-activations in a sparse subpopulation of Wasserstein neurons as an actively used substrate for syntax in smooth-activation language models.

Scalable and realistic simulation of multi-agent traffic behavior is critical for advancing autonomous driving technologies. Although existing data-driven simulators have made significant strides in this domain, they predominantly rely on supervised learning to align simulated distributions with real-world driving scenarios. A persistent challenge, however, lies in the distributional shift that arises between training and testing, which often undermines model generalization in unseen environments. To address this limitation, we propose SMART-R1, a novel R1-style reinforcement fine-tuning paradigm tailored for next-token prediction models to better align agent behavior with human preferences and evaluation metrics. Our approach introduces a metric-oriented policy optimization algorithm to improve distribution alignment and an iterative "SFT-RFT-SFT" training strategy that alternates between Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) to maximize performance gains. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) validate the effectiveness of this simple yet powerful R1-style training framework in enhancing foundation models. The results on the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge (WOSAC) showcase that SMART-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance with an overall realism meta score of 0.7858, ranking first on the leaderboard at the time of submission.

Deep generative models have advanced text-to-online handwriting generation (TOHG), which aims to synthesize realistic pen trajectories conditioned on textual input and style references. However, most existing methods still primarily focus on character- or word-level generation, resulting in inefficiency and a lack of holistic structural modeling when applied to full text lines. To address these issues, we propose DiffInk, the first latent diffusion Transformer framework for full-line handwriting generation. We first introduce InkVAE, a novel sequential variational autoencoder enhanced with two complementary latent-space regularization losses: (1) an OCR-based loss enforcing glyph-level accuracy, and (2) a style-classification loss preserving writing style. This dual regularization yields a semantically structured latent space where character content and writer styles are effectively disentangled. We then introduce InkDiT, a novel latent diffusion Transformer that integrates target text and reference styles to generate coherent pen trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate that DiffInk outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both glyph accuracy and style fidelity, while significantly improving generation efficiency.

Recent work has demonstrated that complex visual stimuli can be decoded from human brain activity using deep generative models, offering new ways to probe how the brain represents real-world scenes. However, many existing approaches first map brain signals into intermediate image or text feature spaces before guiding the generative process, which obscures the contributions of different brain areas to the final reconstruction output. In this work, we propose NeuroAdapter, a visual decoding framework that directly conditions a latent diffusion model on brain representations, bypassing the need for intermediate feature spaces. Our method demonstrates competitive visual reconstruction quality on public fMRI datasets compared to prior work, while providing greater transparency into how brain signals drive visual reconstruction. To this end, we introduce an Image-Brain BI-directional interpretability framework (IBBI) that analyzes cross-attention patterns across diffusion denoising steps to reveal how different cortical areas influence the unfolding generative trajectory. Our work highlights the potential of end-to-end brain-to-image reconstruction and establishes a path for interpretable neural decoding.

Under the data manifold hypothesis, high-dimensional data are concentrated near a low-dimensional manifold. We study the problem of Riemannian optimization over such manifolds when they are given only implicitly through the data distribution, and the standard manifold operations required by classical algorithms are unavailable. This formulation captures a broad class of data-driven design problems that are central to modern generative AI. Our key idea is to introduce a link function that connects the data distribution to the geometric operations needed for optimization. We show that this function enables the recovery of essential manifold operations, such as retraction and Riemannian gradient computation. Moreover, we establish a direct connection between our construction and the score function in diffusion models of the data distribution. This connection allows us to leverage well-studied parameterizations, efficient training procedures, and even pretrained score networks from the diffusion model literature to perform optimization. Building on this foundation, we propose two efficient inference-time algorithms -- Denoising Landing Flow (DLF) and Denoising Riemannian Gradient Descent (DRGD) -- and provide theoretical guarantees for both feasibility (approximate manifold adherence) and optimality (small Riemannian gradient norm). Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on finite-horizon reference tracking tasks in data-driven control, highlighting its potential for practical generative and design applications.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) strengthens LLM reasoning, but training often oscillates between {entropy collapse} and {entropy explosion}. We trace both hazards to the mean baseline used in value-free RL (e.g., GRPO and DAPO), which improperly penalizes negative-advantage samples under reward outliers. We propose {Quantile Advantage Estimation} (QAE), replacing the mean with a group-wise K-quantile baseline. QAE induces a response-level, two-regime gate: on hard queries (p <= 1 - K) it reinforces rare successes, while on easy queries (p > 1 - K) it targets remaining failures. Under first-order softmax updates, we prove {two-sided entropy safety}, giving lower and upper bounds on one-step entropy change that curb explosion and prevent collapse. Empirically, this minimal modification stabilizes entropy, sparsifies credit assignment (with tuned K, roughly 80% of responses receive zero advantage), and yields sustained pass@1 gains on Qwen3-8B/14B-Base across AIME 2024/2025 and AMC 2023. These results identify {baseline design} -- rather than token-level heuristics -- as the primary mechanism for scaling RLVR.

Engineering design operates through hierarchical abstraction from system specifications to component implementations, requiring visual understanding coupled with mathematical reasoning at each level. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at natural image tasks, their ability to extract mathematical models from technical diagrams remains unexplored. We present \textbf{CircuitSense}, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating circuit understanding across this hierarchy through 8,006+ problems spanning component-level schematics to system-level block diagrams. Our benchmark uniquely examines the complete engineering workflow: Perception, Analysis, and Design, with a particular emphasis on the critical but underexplored capability of deriving symbolic equations from visual inputs. We introduce a hierarchical synthetic generation pipeline consisting of a grid-based schematic generator and a block diagram generator with auto-derived symbolic equation labels. Comprehensive evaluation of six state-of-the-art MLLMs, including both closed-source and open-source models, reveals fundamental limitations in visual-to-mathematical reasoning. Closed-source models achieve over 85\% accuracy on perception tasks involving component recognition and topology identification, yet their performance on symbolic derivation and analytical reasoning falls below 19\%, exposing a critical gap between visual parsing and symbolic reasoning. Models with stronger symbolic reasoning capabilities consistently achieve higher design task accuracy, confirming the fundamental role of mathematical understanding in circuit synthesis and establishing symbolic reasoning as the key metric for engineering competence.

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by letting a lightweight draft model propose multiple tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. Yet existing training objectives optimize only a single greedy draft path, while decoding follows a tree policy that re-ranks and verifies multiple branches. This draft policy misalignment limits achievable speedups. We introduce Group Tree Optimization (GTO), which aligns training with the decoding-time tree policy through two components: (i) Draft Tree Reward, a sampling-free objective equal to the expected acceptance length of the draft tree under the target model, directly measuring decoding performance; (ii) Group-based Draft Policy Training, a stable optimization scheme that contrasts trees from the current and a frozen reference draft model, forming debiased group-standardized advantages and applying a PPO-style surrogate along the longest accepted sequence for robust updates. We further prove that increasing our Draft Tree Reward provably improves acceptance length and speedup. Across dialogue (MT-Bench), code (HumanEval), and math (GSM8K), and multiple LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-3.1-8B, LLaMA-3.3-70B, Vicuna-1.3-13B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-LLaMA-8B, Qwen3-8B), GTO increases acceptance length by (7.4%) and yields an additional (7.7%) speedup over prior state-of-the-art EAGLE-3. By bridging draft policy misalignment, GTO offers a practical, general solution for efficient LLM inference. Code and draft models are available at https://github.com/hsj576/GTO.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved exceptional performance across diverse tasks, continually surpassing previous expectations regarding their capabilities. Nevertheless, their proficiency in perceiving emotions from images remains debated, with studies yielding divergent results in zero-shot scenarios. We argue that this inconsistency stems partly from constraints in existing evaluation methods, including the oversight of plausible responses, limited emotional taxonomies, neglect of contextual factors, and labor-intensive annotations. To facilitate customized visual emotion evaluation for MLLMs, we propose an Emotion Statement Judgment task that overcomes these constraints. Complementing this task, we devise an automated pipeline that efficiently constructs emotion-centric statements with minimal human effort. Through systematically evaluating prevailing MLLMs, our study showcases their stronger performance in emotion interpretation and context-based emotion judgment, while revealing relative limitations in comprehending perception subjectivity. When compared to humans, even top-performing MLLMs like GPT4o demonstrate remarkable performance gaps, underscoring key areas for future improvement. By developing a fundamental evaluation framework and conducting a comprehensive MLLM assessment, we hope this work contributes to advancing emotional intelligence in MLLMs. Project page: https://github.com/wdqqdw/MVEI.

Absorbing discrete diffusion has emerged as a dominant framework for discrete data generation. However, a significant disparity remains between its empirical success and theoretical understanding: existing analyses fail to demonstrate a complexity advantage over the $\mathcal{O}(d \ln(d/ε))$ baseline established for \emph{uniform} discrete diffusion. We bridge this gap by identifying a critical structural advantage: whereas uniform diffusion redundantly re-denoises valid elements, the absorbing scheme denoises each absorbing state exactly once. Leveraging this insight, we introduce \emph{Absorbing-Aware Truncated Uniformization} (AATU). We prove that AATU achieves $ε$-TV convergence with $\mathcal{O}(d \ln d)$ complexity-\emph{independent} of the error tolerance $ε$-thereby strictly outperforming existing uniform baselines. Beyond improving convergence rates, our analysis eliminates the restrictive bounded-score assumption commonly required in prior studies of uniformization-based inference. Furthermore, we extend AATU to time-invariant parameterizations, showing that it naturally adopts an imputation-type inference with a uniformly randomized denoising order. When combined with a lazy update strategy, TV convergence requires only $\mathcal{O}(d)$ discrete score evaluations. These results not only establish a rigorous foundation for absorbing discrete diffusion -- confirming its efficiency in high-accuracy generation -- but also open new avenues for analyzing diffusion-based language models under the masking paradigm.

The generation of quadrilateral-dominant meshes is a cornerstone of professional 3D content creation. However, existing generative models generate quad meshes by first generating triangle meshes and then merging triangles into quadrilaterals with some specific rules, which typically produces quad meshes with poor topology. In this paper, we introduce QuadGPT, the first autoregressive framework for generating quadrilateral meshes in an end-to-end manner. QuadGPT formulates this as a sequence prediction paradigm, distinguished by two key innovations: a unified tokenization method to handle mixed topologies of triangles and quadrilaterals, and a specialized Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning method tDPO for better generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QuadGPT significantly surpasses previous triangle-to-quad conversion pipelines in both geometric accuracy and topological quality. Our work establishes a new benchmark for native quad-mesh generation and showcases the power of combining large-scale autoregressive models with topology-aware RL refinement for creating structured 3D assets.

Image composition aims to seamlessly insert a user-specified object into a new scene, but existing models struggle with complex lighting (e.g., accurate shadows, water reflections) and diverse, high-resolution inputs. Modern text-to-image diffusion models (e.g., SD3.5, FLUX) already encode essential physical and resolution priors, yet lack a framework to unleash them without resorting to latent inversion, which often locks object poses into contextually inappropriate orientations, or brittle attention surgery. We propose SHINE, a training-free framework for Seamless, High-fidelity Insertion with Neutralized Errors. SHINE introduces manifold-steered anchor loss, leveraging pretrained customization adapters (e.g., IP-Adapter) to guide latents for faithful subject representation while preserving background integrity. Degradation-suppression guidance and adaptive background blending are proposed to further eliminate low-quality outputs and visible seams. To address the lack of rigorous benchmarks, we introduce ComplexCompo, featuring diverse resolutions and challenging conditions such as low lighting, strong illumination, intricate shadows, and reflective surfaces. Experiments on ComplexCompo and DreamEditBench show state-of-the-art performance on standard metrics (e.g., DINOv2) and human-aligned scores (e.g., DreamSim, ImageReward, VisionReward). Code is available at https://github.com/ZhumingLian/SHINE.

Non-prehensile manipulation, encompassing ungraspable actions such as pushing, poking, pivoting, and wrapping, remains underexplored due to its contact-rich and analytically intractable nature. We revisit this problem from two perspectives. First, instead of relying on single-arm setups or favorable environmental supports (e.g., walls or edges), we advocate a generalizable dual-arm configuration and establish a suite of Bimanual Non-prehensile Manipulation Primitives (BiNoMaP). Second, departing from prevailing RL-based approaches, we propose a three-stage, RL-free framework for learning structured non-prehensile skills. We begin by extracting bimanual hand motion trajectories from video demonstrations. Since these coarse trajectories suffer from perceptual noise and morphological discrepancies, we introduce a geometry-aware post-optimization algorithm to refine them into executable manipulation primitives consistent with predefined motion patterns. To enable category-level generalization, the learned primitives are further parameterized by object-relevant geometric attributes, primarily size, allowing adaptation to unseen instances with significant shape variations. Importantly, BiNoMaP supports cross-embodiment transfer: the same primitives can be deployed on two real-world dual-arm platforms with distinct kinematic configurations, without redesigning skill structures. Extensive real-robot experiments across diverse objects and spatial configurations demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and strong generalization capability of our approach.

A fundamental challenge in graph learning is understanding how models generalize to new, unseen graphs. While synthetic benchmarks offer controlled settings for analysis, existing approaches are confined to single-graph, transductive settings where models train and test on the same graph structure. Addressing this gap, we introduce GraphUniverse, a framework for generating entire families of graphs to enable the first systematic evaluation of inductive generalization at scale. Our core innovation is the generation of graphs with persistent semantic communities, ensuring conceptual consistency while allowing fine-grained control over structural properties like homophily and degree distributions. This enables crucial but underexplored robustness tests, such as performance under controlled distribution shifts. Benchmarking a wide range of architectures -- from GNNs to graph transformers and topological architectures -- reveals that strong transductive performance is a poor predictor of inductive generalization. Furthermore, we find that robustness to distribution shift is highly sensitive not only to model architecture choice but also to the initial graph regime (e.g., high vs. low homophily). Beyond benchmarking, GraphUniverse's flexibility and scalability can facilitate the development of robust and truly generalizable architectures. The framework is open-source at https://github.com/LouisVanLangendonck/GraphUniverse.