Recent open-vocabulary robot mapping methods enrich dense geometric maps with pre-trained visual-language features, achieving a high level of detail and guiding robots to find objects specified by open-vocabulary language queries. While the issue of scalability for such approaches has received some attention, another fundamental problem is that high-detail object mapping quickly becomes outdated, as objects get moved around a lot. In this work, we develop a mapping and navigation system for object-goal navigation that, from the ground up, considers the possibilities that a queried object can have moved, or may not be mapped at all. Instead of striving for high-fidelity mapping detail, we consider that the main purpose of a map is to provide environment grounding and context, which we combine with the semantic priors of LLMs to reason about object locations and deploy an active, online approach to navigate to the objects. Through simulated and real-world experiments we find that our approach tends to have higher retrieval success at shorter path lengths for static objects and by far outperforms prior approaches in cases of dynamic or unmapped object queries. We provide our code and dataset at: https://github.com/xiexiexiaoxiexie/osmAG-LLM.

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used technique for conditional generation and improving sample quality in continuous diffusion models, and its extensions to discrete diffusion has recently started to be investigated. In order to improve the algorithms in a principled way, this paper starts by analyzing the exact effect of CFG in the context of a low-dimensional masked diffusion model, with a special emphasis on the guidance schedule. Our analysis shows that high guidance early in sampling (when inputs are heavily masked) harms generation quality, while late-stage guidance improves it. These findings provide a theoretical explanation for empirical observations in recent studies on guidance schedules. The analysis also reveals an imperfection of the current CFG implementations. These implementations can unintentionally cause imbalanced transitions, such as unmasking too rapidly during the early stages of generation, which degrades the quality of the resulting samples. To address this, we draw insight from the analysis and propose a novel classifier-free guidance mechanism. Intuitively, our method smooths the transport between the data distribution and the initial (masked) distribution, resulting in improved sample quality. Remarkably, our method is achievable via a simple one-line code change. Experiments on conditional image and text generation empirically confirm the efficacy of our method.

Generative concept bottleneck models aim to enable interpretable generation by routing synthesis through explicit, user-facing concepts. In practice, prior approaches often rely on non-explicit bottleneck representations (e.g., vision cues or opaque concept embeddings) or black-box decoders to preserve image quality, which weakens the transparency. We propose CoBELa (Concept Bottlenecks on Energy Landscapes), a decoder-free, energy-based framework that eliminates non-explicit bottleneck representations by conditioning generation entirely through per-concept energy functions over the latent space of a frozen pretrained generator-requiring no generator retraining and enabling post-hoc interpretation. Because these concept energies compose additively, CoBELa naturally supports compositional concept interventions: concept conjunction and negation are realized by summing or subtracting per-concept energy terms without additional training. A diffusion-scheduled energy guidance scheme further replaces expensive MCMC chains with more stable, scheduled denoising for efficient concept-steered sampling. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and CUB-200-2011 demonstrate improvements over prior concept bottleneck generative models, achieving 75.70%/82.42% concept accuracy and 6.47/5.37 FID, respectively, while enabling reliable multi-concept interventions.

This paper proposes a game theoretic framework that models the interaction between prompt engineers and large language models (LLMs) as a two player extensive form game coupled with a Rapidly exploring Random Trees (RRT) search over prompt space. The attacker incrementally samples, extends, and tests prompts, while the LLM chooses to accept, reject, or redirect, leading to terminal outcomes of Safe Interaction, Blocked, or Jailbreak. Embedding RRT exploration inside the extensive form game captures both the discovery phase of jailbreak strategies and the strategic responses of the model. Furthermore, we show that the defender behavior can be interpreted through a local Stackelberg equilibrium condition, which explains when the attacker can no longer obtain profitable prompt deviations and provides a theoretical lens for understanding the effectiveness of our Purple Agent defense. The resulting game tree thus offers a principled foundation for evaluating, interpreting, and hardening LLM guardrails.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) are widely used to encode data as continuous functions, enabling the visualization of large-scale multivariate scientific simulation data with reduced memory usage. However, existing INR-based methods face three main limitations: (1) inflexible representation of complex structures, (2) primarily focusing on single-variable data, and (3) dependence on structured grids. Thus, their performance degrades when applied to complex real-world datasets. To address these limitations, we propose a novel neural network-based framework, MC-INR, which handles multivariate data on unstructured grids. It combines meta-learning and clustering to enable flexible encoding of complex structures. To further improve performance, we introduce a residual-based dynamic re-clustering mechanism that adaptively partitions clusters based on local error. We also propose a branched layer to leverage multivariate data through independent branches simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that MC-INR outperforms existing methods on scientific data encoding tasks.

Despite the critical role of reward models (RMs) in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), current state-of-the-art open RMs perform poorly on most existing evaluation benchmarks, failing to capture nuanced human preferences. We hypothesize that this brittleness stems primarily from limitations in preference datasets, which are often narrowly scoped, synthetically labeled, or lack rigorous quality control. To address these challenges, we present SynPref-40M, a large-scale preference dataset comprising 40 million preference pairs. To enable data curation at scale, we design a human-AI synergistic two-stage pipeline that leverages the complementary strengths of human annotation quality and AI scalability. In this pipeline, humans provide verified annotations, while LLMs perform automatic curation based on human guidance. Training on this preference mixture, we introduce Skywork-Reward-V2, a suite of eight reward models ranging from 0.6B to 8B parameters, trained on a carefully curated subset of 26 million preference pairs from SynPref-40M. We demonstrate that Skywork-Reward-V2 is versatile across a wide range of capabilities, including alignment with human preferences, objective correctness, safety, resistance to stylistic biases, and best-of-N scaling. These reward models achieve state-of-the-art performance across seven major reward model benchmarks, outperform generative reward models, and demonstrate strong downstream performance. Ablation studies confirm that effectiveness stems not only from data scale but also from high-quality curation. The Skywork-Reward-V2 series represents substantial progress in open reward models, demonstrating how human-AI curation synergy can unlock significantly higher data quality.

Autoregressive language models are trained exclusively left-to-right. We explore the complementary factorization, training right-to-left at scale, and ask what reasoning patterns emerge when a model conditions on future context to predict the past. We train LEDOM, an open-source purely reverse autoregressive language model (2B/7B parameters, 435B tokens), and find it develops capabilities distinct from forward models, including abductive inference, question synthesis, and natural resolution of the reversal curse. We then explore one application of the reverse model: combining forward likelihood $P(y \mid x)$ with reverse posterior $P(x \mid y)$ through noisy channel duality. We propose Reverse Reward, which reranks forward outputs using reverse posterior estimates, and prove that bidirectional scoring penalizes hallucinated reasoning chains whose backward reconstruction degrades. Reverse Reward yields gains of up to 6.6\% on AIME 2024 and 15\% on AMC 2023 across multiple strong baselines. We release all models, code, and data here.

Despite their impressive capabilities, aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate outputs that lack diversity. What drives this consistency in the generation? We investigate this phenomenon through the lens of probability concentration in the model's output distribution. To quantify this concentration, we introduce the *Branching Factor* (BF) -- a token-invariant measure of the effective number of plausible next steps during generation. Our empirical analysis reveals two key findings: (1) BF often decreases as generation progresses, suggesting that LLMs become more predictable as they generate. (2) alignment tuning substantially sharpens the model's output distribution from the outset, reducing BF by a factor of 2-5 overall, and up to an order of magnitude (e.g., from 12 to 1.2) at the beginning positions. This stark reduction helps explain why aligned models often appear less sensitive to decoding strategies. Building on this insight, we find this consistency has surprising implications for complex reasoning. Aligned Chain-of-Thought (CoT) models (e.g., DeepSeek-distilled models), for instance, leverage this effect; by generating longer reasoning chains, they push generation into later, more deterministic (lower BF) stages, resulting in more stable outputs. We hypothesize that alignment tuning does not fundamentally change a model's behavior, but instead steers it toward stylistic tokens (e.g., "Sure") that unlock low-entropy trajectories already present in the base model. This view is supported by nudging experiments, which show prompting base models with such tokens can similarly reduce BF. Together, our findings establish BF as a powerful diagnostic for understanding and controlling LLM outputs - clarifying how alignment reduces variability, how CoT promotes stable generations, and how base models can be steered away from diversity.

Diffusion-based image generation models excel at producing high-quality synthetic content, but suffer from slow and computationally expensive inference. Prior work has attempted to mitigate this by caching and reusing features within diffusion transformers across inference steps. These methods, however, often rely on rigid heuristics that result in limited acceleration or poor generalization across architectures. We propose Evolutionary Caching to Accelerate Diffusion models (ECAD), a genetic algorithm that learns efficient, per-model, caching schedules forming a Pareto frontier, using only a small set of calibration prompts. ECAD requires no modifications to network parameters or reference images. It offers significant inference speedups, enables fine-grained control over the quality-latency trade-off, and adapts seamlessly to different diffusion models. Notably, ECAD's learned schedules can generalize effectively to resolutions and model variants not seen during calibration. We evaluate ECAD on PixArt-alpha, PixArt-Sigma, and FLUX$.$1-dev using multiple metrics (FID, CLIP, Image Reward) across diverse benchmarks (COCO, MJHQ-30k, PartiPrompts), demonstrating consistent improvements over previous approaches. On PixArt-alpha, ECAD identifies a schedule that outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 4.47 COCO FID while increasing inference speedup from 2.35x to 2.58x. Our results establish ECAD as a scalable and generalizable approach for accelerating diffusion inference. Our project page and code are available here: https://research.aniaggarwal.com/ecad

Composite indicators are widely used to score or classify units evaluated on multiple criteria. Their construction typically involves aggregating criteria evaluations, a common practice in Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA). Beyond producing a final score or classification, however, ensuring explainability, interpretability, and transparency is crucial. This paper proposes a novel framework for constructing explainable and interpretable composite indicators using if-then decision rules. We explore four scenarios: (i) decision rules explaining classifications derived from the sum of ordinal indicator codes; (ii) interpretation of an opaque numerical composite indicator used to classify units into quantiles; (iii) construction of a composite indicator from decision-maker preference information, given as classifications of reference units; and (iv) explanation of classifications generated by an existing MCDA method. To induce the rules from scored or classified units, we apply the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach. The resulting rules relate class assignments or scores to threshold conditions on indicator values in a clear and intelligible way, clarifying the underlying rationale and supporting the assessment of new units. Our main methodological contribution is the introduction of a decision-rule-based framework for constructing composite indicators. Moreover, the framework extends naturally to continuous composite indicators by treating each distinct score as an ordered class. This is enabled by a new algorithm that efficiently induces all minimal rules in a single run. Although this may yield many rules, explainability is preserved by showing only those satisfied by the unit of interest. Finally, the methodology can handle datasets with missing values, enhancing its practical applicability.

Large language models (LLMs) possess a remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), which enables them to handle multiple downstream tasks simultaneously without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Recent studies have shown that even moderately sized LLMs, such as Mistral 7B, Gemma 7B and Llama-3 8B, can achieve ICL through few-shot in-context fine-tuning of all tasks at once. However, this approach still lags behind dedicated fine-tuning, where a separate model is trained for each individual task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Many-Shot In-Context Fine-tuning (ManyICL), which significantly narrows this performance gap by extending the principles of ICL to a many-shot setting. To unlock the full potential of ManyICL and address the inherent inefficiency of processing long sequences with numerous in-context examples, we propose a novel training objective. Instead of solely predicting the final answer, our approach treats every answer within the context as a supervised training target. This effectively shifts the role of many-shot examples from prompts to targets for autoregressive learning. Through extensive experiments on diverse downstream tasks, including classification, summarization, question answering, natural language inference, and math, we demonstrate that ManyICL substantially outperforms zero/few-shot fine-tuning and approaches the performance of dedicated fine-tuning. Furthermore, ManyICL significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting issues observed in zero/few-shot fine-tuning. The code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Real-time reconstruction of dynamic 3D scenes from uncalibrated video streams demands robust online methods that recover scene dynamics from sparse observations under strict latency and memory constraints. Yet most dynamic reconstruction methods rely on hours of per-scene optimization under full-sequence access, limiting practical deployment. In this work, we introduce StreamSplat, a fully feed-forward framework that instantly transforms uncalibrated video streams of arbitrary length into dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representations in an online manner. It is achieved via three key technical innovations: 1) a probabilistic sampling mechanism that robustly predicts 3D Gaussians from uncalibrated inputs; 2) a bidirectional deformation field that yields reliable associations across frames and mitigates long-term error accumulation; 3) an adaptive Gaussian fusion operation that propagates persistent Gaussians while handling emerging and vanishing ones. Extensive experiments on standard dynamic and static benchmarks demonstrate that StreamSplat achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and dynamic scene modeling. Uniquely, our method supports the online reconstruction of arbitrarily long video streams with a 1200x speedup over optimization-based methods. Our code and models are available at https://streamsplat3d.github.io/.

Enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is a challenging task that has attracted increasing attention in the community. Recently, several studies have applied Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to the multimodal domain in order to enhance the reasoning abilities of MLLMs. However, these works largely overlook the enhancement of multimodal perception capabilities in MLLMs, which serve as a core prerequisite and foundational component of complex multimodal reasoning. Through McNemar's test, we find that existing RLVR method fails to effectively enhance the multimodal perception capabilities of MLLMs, thereby limiting their further improvement in multimodal reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose Perception-R1, which introduces a novel visual perception reward that explicitly encourages MLLMs to perceive the visual content accurately, thereby can effectively incentivizing both their multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. Specifically, we first collect textual visual annotations from the CoT trajectories of multimodal problems, which will serve as visual references for reward assignment. During RLVR training, we employ a judging LLM to assess the consistency between the visual annotations and the responses generated by MLLM, and assign the visual perception reward based on these consistency judgments. Extensive experiments on several multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our Perception-R1, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on most benchmarks using only 1,442 training data. Our code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/tongxiao2002/Perception-R1.

Search-augmented language models combine web search with Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve response groundedness and freshness. However, analyzing these systems remains challenging: existing datasets are limited in scale and narrow in scope, often constrained to static, single-turn, fact-checking questions. In this work, we introduce Search Arena, a crowd-sourced, large-scale, human-preference dataset of over 24,000 paired multi-turn user interactions with search-augmented LLMs. The dataset spans diverse intents and languages, and contains full system traces with around 12,000 human preference votes. Our analysis reveals that user preferences are influenced by the number of citations, even when the cited content does not directly support the attributed claims, uncovering a gap between perceived and actual credibility. Furthermore, user preferences vary across cited sources, revealing that community-driven platforms are generally preferred and static encyclopedic sources are not always appropriate and reliable. To assess performance across different settings, we conduct cross-arena analyses by testing search-augmented LLMs in a general-purpose chat environment and conventional LLMs in search-intensive settings. We find that web search does not degrade and may even improve performance in non-search settings; however, the quality in search settings is significantly affected if solely relying on the model's parametric knowledge. We open-sourced the dataset to support future research. Our dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/lmarena/search-arena.

One of the fundamental problems in digital agents is their lack of understanding of their environment. For instance, a web browsing agent may get lost in unfamiliar websites, uncertain what pages must be visited to achieve its goals. To address this, we propose Go-Browse, a method for automatically collecting diverse and realistic web agent data at scale through structured exploration of web environments. Go-Browse achieves efficient exploration by framing data collection as a graph search, enabling reuse of information across exploration episodes. We instantiate our method on the WebArena benchmark, collecting a dataset of 10K successful task-solving trajectories and 40K interaction steps across 100 URLs. Fine-tuning a 7B parameter language model on this dataset achieves a success rate of 21.7% on the WebArena benchmark, beating GPT-4o mini by 2.4% and exceeding current state-of-the-art results for sub-10B parameter models by 2.9%.

Fine-tuning is a critical step for adapting large language models (LLMs) to domain-specific downstream tasks. To mitigate the substantial computational and memory costs of full-model fine-tuning, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have been proposed to update only a small subset of model parameters. However, performance gaps between PEFT approaches and full-model fine-tuning still exist. In this work, we present DiaBlo, a simple yet effective PEFT approach that updates only the diagonal blocks of selected model weight matrices. Unlike Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants, DiaBlo eliminates the need for low-rank matrix products, thereby avoiding the reliance on auxiliary initialization schemes or customized optimization strategies to improve convergence. This design leads to stable and robust convergence while maintaining comparable memory efficiency and training speed to LoRA. Moreover, we provide theoretical guarantees showing that, under mild low-rank conditions, DiaBlo is more expressive than LoRA in the linear problem and converges to a stationary point of the general nonlinear full fine-tuning. Through extensive experiments across a range of tasks, including commonsense reasoning, arithmetic reasoning, code generation, and safety alignment, we show that fine-tuning only diagonal blocks is sufficient for strong and consistent performance. DiaBlo not only achieves competitive accuracy but also preserves high memory efficiency and fast fine-tuning speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/ziyangjoy/DiaBlo.

Electrostatic field matching (EFM) has recently appeared as a novel physics-inspired paradigm for data generation and transfer using the idea of an electric capacitor. However, it requires modeling electrostatic fields using neural networks, which is non-trivial because of the necessity to take into account the complex field outside the capacitor plates. In this paper, we propose Interaction Field Matching (IFM), a generalization of EFM which allows using general interaction fields beyond the electrostatic one. Furthermore, inspired by strong interactions between quarks and antiquarks in physics, we design a particular interaction field realization which solves the problems which arise when modeling electrostatic fields in EFM. We show the performance on a series of toy and image data transfer problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/justkolesov/InteractionFieldMatching

Learning population dynamics involves recovering the underlying process that governs particle evolution, given evolutionary snapshots of samples at discrete time points. Recent methods frame this as an energy minimization problem in probability space and leverage the celebrated JKO scheme for efficient time discretization. In this work, we introduce $\texttt{iJKOnet}$, an approach that combines the JKO framework with inverse optimization techniques to learn population dynamics. Our method relies on a conventional $\textit{end-to-end}$ adversarial training procedure and does not require restrictive architectural choices, e.g., input-convex neural networks. We establish theoretical guarantees for our methodology and demonstrate improved performance over prior JKO-based methods. The code of $\texttt{iJKOnet}$ is available at https://github.com/MuXauJl11110/iJKOnet.

We introduce WARP (Weight-space Adaptive Recurrent Prediction), a simple yet powerful model that unifies weight-space learning with linear recurrence to redefine sequence modeling. Unlike conventional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) which collapse temporal dynamics into fixed-dimensional hidden states, WARP explicitly parametrizes its hidden state as the weights and biases of a distinct auxiliary neural network, and uses input differences to drive its recurrence. This brain-inspired formulation enables efficient gradient-free adaptation of the auxiliary network at test-time, in-context learning abilities, and seamless integration of domain-specific physical priors. Empirical validation shows that WARP matches or surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on diverse classification tasks, featuring in the top three in 4 out of 6 real-world challenging datasets. Furthermore, extensive experiments across sequential image completion, multivariate time series forecasting, and dynamical system reconstruction demonstrate its expressiveness and generalisation capabilities. Remarkably, a physics-informed variant of our model outperforms the next best model by more than 10x. Ablation studies confirm the architectural necessity of key components, solidifying weight-space linear RNNs as a transformative paradigm for adaptive machine intelligence.

Adversarial robustness of BEV 3D object detectors is critical for autonomous driving (AD). Existing invasive attacks require altering the target vehicle itself (e.g. attaching patches), making them unrealistic and impractical for real-world evaluation. While non-invasive attacks that place adversarial objects in the environment are more practical, current methods still lack the multi-view and temporal consistency needed for physically plausible threats. In this paper, we present the first framework for generating universal, non-invasive, and 3D-consistent adversarial objects that expose fundamental vulnerabilities for BEV 3D object detectors. Instead of modifying target vehicles, our method inserts rendered objects into scenes with an occlusion-aware module that enforces physical plausibility across views and time. To maintain attack effectiveness across views and frames, we optimize adversarial object appearance using a BEV spatial feature-guided optimization strategy that attacks the detector's internal representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our learned universal adversarial objects can consistently degrade multiple BEV detectors from various viewpoints and distances. More importantly, the new environment-manipulation attack paradigm exposes models' over-reliance on contextual cues and provides a practical pipeline for robustness evaluation in AD systems.

Adversarial samples exploit irregularities in the manifold `learned' by deep learning models to cause misclassifications. The study of these adversarial samples provides insight into the features a model uses to classify inputs, which can be leveraged to improve robustness against future attacks. However, much of the existing literature focuses on constrained adversarial samples, which do not accurately reflect test-time errors encountered in real-world settings. To address this, we propose `NatADiff', an adversarial sampling scheme that leverages denoising diffusion to generate natural adversarial samples. Our approach is based on the observation that natural adversarial samples frequently contain structural elements from the adversarial class. Deep learning models can exploit these structural elements to shortcut the classification process, rather than learning to genuinely distinguish between classes. To leverage this behavior, we guide the diffusion trajectory towards the intersection of the true and adversarial classes, combining time-travel sampling with augmented classifier guidance to enhance attack transferability while preserving image fidelity. Our method achieves comparable attack success rates to current state-of-the-art techniques, while exhibiting significantly higher transferability across model architectures and better alignment with natural test-time errors as measured by FID. These results demonstrate that NatADiff produces adversarial samples that not only transfer more effectively across models, but more faithfully resemble naturally occurring test-time errors.

The choice of initial noise strongly affects quality and prompt alignment in video diffusion; different seeds for the same prompt can yield drastically different results. While recent methods use externally designed priors (e.g., frequency filtering or inter-frame smoothing), they often overlook internal model signals that indicate inherently preferable seeds. To address this, we propose ANSE (Active Noise Selection for Generation), a model-aware framework that selects high-quality seeds by quantifying attention-based uncertainty. At its core is BANSA (Bayesian Active Noise Selection via Attention), an acquisition function that measures entropy disagreement across multiple stochastic attention samples to estimate model confidence and consistency. For efficient inference-time deployment, we introduce a Bernoulli-masked approximation of BANSA that estimates scores from a single diffusion step and a subset of informative attention layers. Experiments across diverse text-to-video backbones demonstrate improved video quality and temporal coherence with marginal inference overhead, providing a principled and generalizable approach to noise selection in video diffusion. See our project page: https://anse-project.github.io/anse-project/.

While large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential across various domains, their applications in robotics remain largely limited to static prompt-based behaviors and still face challenges in complex tasks under zero-shot or few-shot settings. Inspired by human metacognitive learning and creative problem-solving, we address this limitation by exploring a fundamental question: Can LLMs be empowered with metacognitive capabilities to reason, reflect, and create, thereby enhancing their ability to perform robotic tasks with minimal demonstrations? In this paper, we present REFLEX, a framework that integrates metacognitive learning into LLM-powered multi-robot collaboration. The system equips the LLM-powered robotic agents with a skill decomposition and self-reflection mechanism that identifies modular skills from prior tasks, reflects on failures in unseen task scenarios, and synthesizes effective new solutions. We propose a more challenging robotic benchmark task and evaluate our framework on the existing benchmark and the novel task. Experimental results show that our metacognitive learning framework significantly outperforms existing baselines. Moreover, we observe that our framework can generate solutions that differ from the ground truth yet still successfully complete the tasks. These findings support our hypothesis that metacognitive learning can foster creativity in robotic planning.

Scaling up high-quality trajectory data has long been a critical bottleneck for developing human-like computer use agents. We introduce PC Agent-E, an efficient agent training framework that significantly reduces reliance on large-scale human demonstrations. Starting with just 312 human-annotated computer use trajectories, we further augment them by synthesizing diverse alternative action decisions with Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Trained on these enriched trajectories, our PC Agent-E model achieved a remarkable 141 relative improvement, and even surpassed the Claude 3.7 Sonnet by 10% in relative terms on WindowsAgentArena-V2, an improved benchmark we also released. By integrating robust human computer use skills with automated AI data synthesis capabilities, our method not only brought substantial improvements over training on human trajectories alone, but also significantly surpassed direct distillation from Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/PC-Agent-E

The high-dimensional parameter space of deep neural networks -- the neuromanifold -- is endowed with a unique metric tensor defined by the Fisher information. Reliable and scalable computation of this metric tensor is valuable for theorists and practitioners. Focusing on neural classifiers, we return to a low-dimensional space of probability distributions, which we call the core space, and examine the spectrum and envelopes of its Fisher information matrix. We extend our discoveries there to deterministic bounds for the metric tensor on the neuromanifold. We introduce an unbiased random estimator based on Hutchinson's trace method and derive related bounds. It can be evaluated efficiently with a single backward pass per batch, with a standard deviation bounded by the true value up to scaling.

Integrating Large Language Models with symbolic planners is a promising direction for obtaining verifiable and grounded plans, with recent work extending this idea to visual domains using Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, a rigorous comparison with methods that plan directly with VLMs is missing, due to a lack of visual benchmarks that support symbolic planning. We present ViPlan, the first open-source benchmark for comparing VLM-grounded symbolic approaches (VLM-as-grounder) with direct VLM planning methods (VLM-as-planner). ViPlan introduces a series of increasingly challenging tasks in two visual domains: a visual variant of the classic Blocksworld planning problem and a simulated household robotics environment. We find VLM-as-grounder methods to outperform direct VLM planning in Blocksworld (solving 46% of the tasks against 9%), where image grounding is both crucial and accurate. However, in the household robotics tasks, where linguistic knowledge helps, VLM-as-planner methods are greatly superior to VLM-as-grounder approaches (solving 34% of the tasks against 5%), which are hindered by partial observability. Thus, ViPlan domains capture fundamental shortcomings of both planning approaches, which we further diagnose with a qualitative failure analysis. Finally, across methods, we observe no consistent benefit from Chain-of-Thought prompting, suggesting persistent limitations in current VLMs' visual reasoning abilities.

Effective social intelligence simulation requires language agents to dynamically adjust reasoning depth, a capability notably absent in current studies. Existing methods either lack explicit reasoning or employ lengthy Chain-of-Thought reasoning uniformly across all scenarios, resulting in excessive token usage and inflexible social behaviors in tasks such as negotiation or collaboration. To address this, we propose an $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{S}$ocial $\textbf{L}$earning ($\textbf{ASL}$) framework in this paper, aiming to improve the adaptive reasoning ability of language agents in dynamic social interactions. To this end, we first identify the hierarchical reasoning modes under such context, ranging from intuitive response to deep deliberation based on the cognitive control theory. We then develop the $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{M}$ode $\textbf{P}$olicy $\textbf{O}$ptimization ($\textbf{AMPO}$) algorithm to learn the context-aware mode adaptation and reasoning. Our framework advances existing research in three key aspects: (1) Multi-granular reasoning mode design, (2) Context-aware mode switching in rich social interaction, and (3) Token-efficient reasoning with depth adaptation. Extensive experiments on the benchmark social intelligence environment verify that ASL achieves 15.6% higher task performance than GPT-4o. Notably, our AMPO outperforms GRPO by 7.0% with 32.8% shorter thinking chains, demonstrating the advantages of our AMPO and the learned adaptive reasoning ability over GRPO's solution.

The post-training phase of large language models is essential for enhancing capabilities such as instruction-following, reasoning, and alignment with human preferences. However, it demands extensive high-quality data and poses risks like overfitting, alongside significant computational costs due to repeated post-training and evaluation after each base model update. This paper introduces $ParamΔ$, a novel method that streamlines post-training by transferring knowledge from an existing post-trained model to a newly updated base model with ZERO additional training. By computing the difference between post-trained model weights ($Θ_\text{post}$) and base model weights ($Θ_\text{base}$), and adding this to the updated base model ($Θ'_\text{base}$), we define $ParamΔ$ Model as: $Θ_{\text{Param}Δ} = Θ_\text{post} - Θ_\text{base} + Θ'_\text{base}$. This approach surprisingly equips the new base model with post-trained capabilities, achieving performance comparable to direct post-training. We did analysis on LLama3, Llama3.1, Qwen, and DeepSeek-distilled models. Results indicate $ParamΔ$ Model effectively replicates traditional post-training. For example, the $ParamΔ$ Model obtained from 70B Llama3-inst, Llama3-base, Llama3.1-base models attains approximately 95\% of Llama3.1-inst model's performance on average. $ParamΔ$ brings a new perspective on how to fully leverage models in the open-weight community, where checkpoints for base and instruct models are readily available and frequently updated, by providing a cost-free framework to accelerate the iterative cycle of model development.

Numerous applications of large language models (LLMs) rely on their ability to perform step-by-step reasoning. However, the reasoning behavior of LLMs remains poorly understood, posing challenges to research, development, and safety. To address this gap, we introduce landscape of thoughts (LoT), the first landscape visualization tool to inspect the reasoning trajectories with certain reasoning methods on any multi-choice dataset. We represent the textual states in a trajectory as numerical features that quantify the states' distances to the answer choices. These features are then visualized in two-dimensional plots using t-SNE. Qualitative and quantitative analysis with the landscape of thoughts effectively distinguishes between strong and weak models, correct and incorrect answers, as well as different reasoning tasks. It also uncovers undesirable reasoning patterns, such as low consistency and high uncertainty. Additionally, users can adapt LoT to a model that predicts the property they observe. We showcase this advantage by adapting LoT to a lightweight verifier that evaluates the correctness of trajectories. Empirically, this verifier boosts the reasoning accuracy and the test-time scaling effect. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/landscape-of-thoughts.

Recent diffusion distillation methods have achieved remarkable progress, enabling high-quality ${\sim}4$-step sampling for large-scale text-conditional image and video diffusion models. However, further reducing the number of sampling steps becomes more and more challenging, suggesting that efficiency gains may be better mined along other model axes. Motivated by this perspective, we introduce SwD, a scale-wise diffusion distillation framework that equips few-step models with progressive generation, avoiding redundant computations at intermediate diffusion timesteps. Beyond efficiency, SwD enriches the family of distribution matching distillation approaches by introducing a simple patch-level distillation objective based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). This objective significantly improves the convergence of existing distillation methods and performs surprisingly well in isolation, offering a competitive baseline for diffusion distillation. Applied to state-of-the-art text-to-image/video diffusion models, SwD approaches the sampling speed of two full-resolution steps and largely outperforms alternatives under the same compute budget, as evidenced by automatic metrics and human preference studies. Project page: https://yandex-research.github.io/swd