Large language and music models are increasingly used for constrained generation: rhyming lines, fixed meter, inpainting or infilling, positional endings, and other global form requirements. These systems often perform strikingly well, but the induced procedures are usually not exact conditioning of the underlying autoregressive model. This creates a hidden inferential bias, distinct from the better-known notion of bias inherited from the training set: samples are distorted relative to the true constrained distribution, with no generic guarantee of complete coverage of the admissible solution space or of correct conditional probabilities over valid completions. We formalize several exact inference tasks for autoregressive models and prove corresponding hardness results. For succinctly represented autoregressive models whose next-token probabilities are computable in polynomial time, exact sentence-level maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding is NP-hard. This hardness persists under unary and metrical constraints. On the sampling side, exact conditioned normalization is \#P-hard even for regular constraints such as fixed-length terminal events. Unlike finite-state Markov models, general autoregressive models do not admit a bounded-state dynamic program for these tasks. These results formalize a standard claim in the neural decoding literature: local autoregressive sampling is easy, whereas exact decoding and exact conditioning under global form constraints are computationally intractable in general.

Large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines are often bottlenecked by rollout generation, making end-to-end training slow. Recent work mitigates this by running rollouts with quantization to accelerate decoding, which is the most expensive stage of the RL loop. However, these setups destabilize optimization by amplifying the training-inference gap: rollouts are operated at low precision, while learning updates are computed at full precision. To address this challenge, we propose QaRL (Rollout Alignment Quantization-Aware RL), which aligns training-side forward with the quantized rollout to minimize mismatch. We further identify a failure mode in quantized rollouts: long-form responses tend to produce repetitive, garbled tokens (error tokens). To mitigate these problems, we introduce TBPO (Trust-Band Policy Optimization), a sequence-level objective with dual clipping for negative samples, aimed at keeping updates within the trust region. On Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE for math problems, QaRL outperforms quantized-rollout training by +5.5 while improving stability and preserving low-bit throughput benefits.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting the focus from single, verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios, imposing significant challenges on the post-training phase. In these settings, the scale and complexity of reward systems have grown significantly, transitioning toward multi-objective formulations that encompass a comprehensive spectrum of model capabilities and application contexts. However, traditional methods typically rely on fixed reward weights, ignoring non-stationary learning dynamics and struggling with data heterogeneity across dimensions. To address these issues, we propose SPARD, a framework that establishes an automated, self-paced curriculum by perceiving learning progress to dynamically adjust multi-objective reward weights and data importance, thereby synchronizing learning intent with data utility for optimal performance. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SPARD significantly enhances model capabilities across all domains.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that circumvent safety constraints. Existing strategies, ranging from heuristic prompt engineering to computationally intensive optimization, often face significant trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency. In this work, we propose Contextual Representation Ablation (CRA), a novel inference-time intervention framework designed to dynamically silence model guardrails. Predicated on the geometric insight that refusal behaviors are mediated by specific low-rank subspaces within the model's hidden states, CRA identifies and suppresses these refusal-inducing activation patterns during decoding without requiring expensive parameter updates or training. Empirical evaluation across multiple safety-aligned open-source LLMs demonstrates that CRA significantly outperforms baselines. These results expose the intrinsic fragility of current alignment mechanisms, revealing that safety constraints can be surgically ablated from internal representations, and underscore the urgent need for more robust defenses that secure the model's latent space.

This paper presents an LLM-driven approach for constructing diverse social media datasets to measure and compare loneliness in the caregiver and non-caregiver populations. We introduce an expert-developed loneliness evaluation framework and an expert-informed typology for categorizing causes of loneliness for analyzing social media text. Using a human-validated data processing pipeline, we apply GPT-4o, GPT-5-nano, and GPT-5 to build a high-quality Reddit corpus and analyze loneliness across both populations. The loneliness evaluation framework achieved average accuracies of 76.09% and 79.78% for caregivers and non-caregivers, respectively. The cause categorization framework achieved micro-aggregate F1 scores of 0.825 and 0.80 for caregivers and non-caregivers, respectively. Across populations, we observe substantial differences in the distribution of types of causes of loneliness. Caregivers' loneliness were predominantly linked to caregiving roles, identity recognition, and feelings of abandonment, indicating distinct loneliness experiences between the two groups. Demographic extraction further demonstrates the viability of Reddit for building a diverse caregiver loneliness dataset. Overall, this work establishes an LLM-based pipeline for creating high quality social media datasets for studying loneliness and demonstrates its effectiveness in analyzing population-level differences in the manifestation of loneliness.

We study implicit reasoning, i.e. the ability to combine knowledge or rules within a single forward pass. While transformer-based large language models store substantial factual knowledge and rules, they often fail to compose this knowledge for implicit multi-hop reasoning, suggesting a lack of compositional generalization over their parametric knowledge. To address this limitation, we study recurrent-depth transformers, which enables iterative computation over the same transformer layers. We investigate two compositional generalization challenges under the implicit reasoning scenario: systematic generalization, i.e. combining knowledge that is never used for compositions during training, and depth extrapolation, i.e. generalizing from limited reasoning depth (e.g. training on up to 5-hop) to deeper compositions (e.g. 10-hop). Through controlled studies with models trained from scratch, we show that while vanilla transformers struggle with both generalization challenges, recurrent-depth transformers can effectively make such generalization. For systematic generalization, we find that this ability emerges through a three-stage grokking process, transitioning from memorization to in-distribution generalization and finally to systematic generalization, supported by mechanistic analysis. For depth extrapolation, we show that generalization beyond training depth can be unlocked by scaling inference-time recurrence, with more iterations enabling deeper reasoning. We further study how training strategies affect extrapolation, providing guidance on training recurrent-depth transformers, and identify a key limitation, overthinking, where excessive recurrence degrades predictions and limits generalization to very deep compositions.

We present an end-to-end pipeline that converts healthcare policy documents into executable, data-aware Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) models using large language models (LLMs) for simulation-based policy evaluation. We address the main challenges of automated policy digitization with four contributions: data-grounded BPMN generation with syntax auto-correction, executable augmentation, KPI instrumentation, and entropy-based uncertainty detection. We evaluate the pipeline on diabetic nephropathy prevention guidelines from three Japanese municipalities, generating 100 models per backend across three LLMs and executing each against 1,000 synthetic patients. On well-structured policies, the pipeline achieves a 100% ground-truth match with perfect per-patient decision agreement. Across all conditions, raw per-patient decision agreement exceeds 92%, and entropy scores increase monotonically with document complexity, confirming that the detector reliably separates unambiguous policies from those requiring targeted human clarification.

Tool learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for large language models (LLMs) to address real-world challenges. Due to the extensive and irregularly updated number of tools, tool retrieval for selecting the desired tool subset is essential. However, current tool retrieval methods are usually based on academic benchmarks containing overly detailed instructions (e.g., specific API names and parameters), while real-world instructions are more vague. Such a discrepancy would hinder the tool retrieval in real-world applications. In this paper, we first construct a new benchmark, VGToolBench, to simulate human vague instructions. Based on this, we conduct a series of preliminary analyses and find that vague instructions indeed damage the performance of tool retrieval. To this end, we propose a simple-yet-effective Tool Retrieval Bridge (TRB) approach to boost the performance of tool retrieval for vague instructions. The principle of TRB is to introduce a bridge model to rewrite the vague instructions into more specific ones and alleviate the gap between vague instructions and retriever preferences.We conduct extensive experiments under multiple commonly used retrieval settings, and the results show that TRB effectively mitigates the ambiguity of vague instructions while delivering consistent and substantial improvements across all baseline retrievers. For example, with the help of TRB, BM25 achieves a relative improvement of up to 111.51%, i.e., increasing the average NDCG score from 9.73 to 19.59. The source code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/kfchenhn/TRB.

Long-context inference in LLMs faces the dual challenges of quadratic attention complexity and prohibitive KV cache memory. While token-level sparse attention offers superior accuracy, its indexing overhead is costly; block-level methods improve efficiency but sacrifice precision. We propose AsyncTLS, a hierarchical sparse attention system that combines coarse-grained block filtering with fine-grained token selection to balance accuracy and efficiency, coupled with an asynchronous offloading engine that overlaps KV cache transfers with computation via temporal locality exploitation. Evaluated on Qwen3 and GLM-4.7-Flash across GQA, and MLA architectures, AsyncTLS achieves accuracy comparable to full attention while delivering 1.2x - 10.0x operator speedups and 1.3x - 4.7x end-to-end throughput improvements on 48k - 96k contexts.

Accurate and interpretable plant disease diagnosis remains a major challenge for vision-language models (VLMs) in real-world agriculture. We introduce AgriChain, a dataset of approximately 11,000 expert-curated leaf images spanning diverse crops and pathologies, each paired with (i) a disease label, (ii) a calibrated confidence score (High/Medium/Low), and (iii) an expert-verified chain-of-thought (CoT) rationale. Draft explanations were first generated by GPT-4o and then verified by a professional agricultural engineer using standardized descriptors (e.g., lesion color, margin, and distribution). We fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL-3B on AgriChain, resulting in a specialized model termed AgriChain-VL3B, to jointly predict diseases and generate visually grounded reasoning. On a 1,000-image test set, our CoT-supervised model achieves 73.1% top-1 accuracy (macro F1 = 0.466; weighted F1 = 0.655), outperforming strong baselines including Gemini 1.5 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-4o Mini. The generated explanations align closely with expert reasoning, consistently referencing key visual cues. These findings demonstrate that expert-verified reasoning supervision significantly enhances both accuracy and interpretability, bridging the gap between generic multimodal models and human expertise, and advancing trustworthy, globally deployable AI for sustainable agriculture. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/hazzanabeel12-netizen/agrichain

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the surge of visual tokens significantly increases the inference time and computational overhead, making them impractical for real-time or resource-constrained applications. Visual token pruning is a promising strategy for reducing the cost of MLLM inference by removing redundant visual tokens. Existing research usually assumes that all attention heads contribute equally to the visual interpretation. However, our study reveals that different heads may capture distinct visual semantics and inherently play distinct roles in visual processing. In light of this observation, we propose HAWK, a head importance-aware visual token pruning method that perceives the varying importance of attention heads in visual tasks to maximize the retention of crucial tokens. By leveraging head importance weights and text-guided attention to assess visual token significance, HAWK effectively retains task-relevant visual tokens while removing redundant ones. The proposed HAWK is entirely training-free and can be seamlessly applied to various MLLMs. Extensive experiments on multiple mainstream vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that HAWK achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. When applied to Qwen2.5-VL, HAWK retains 96.0% of the original accuracy after pruning 80.2% of the visual tokens. Additionally, it reduces end-to-end latency to 74.4% of the original and further decreases GPU memory usage across the tested models. The code is available at https://github.com/peppery77/HAWK.git.

Extending LLM context windows is hindered by scarce high-quality long-context data. Recent methods synthesize data with genuine long-range dependencies via information-theoretic verification, selecting contexts that reduce a base model's predictive entropy. However, their single-pass offline construction with a fixed model creates a fundamental off-policy gap: the static screening landscape misaligns with the model's evolving capabilities, causing the training distribution to drift. We propose PolicyLong, shifting data construction towards a dynamic on-policy paradigm. By iteratively re-executing data screening (entropy computation, retrieval, and verification) using the current model, PolicyLong ensures the training distribution tracks evolving capabilities, yielding an emergent self-curriculum. Crucially, both positive and hard negative contexts derive from the current model's entropy landscape, co-evolving what the model learns to exploit and resist. Experiments on RULER, HELMET, and LongBench-v2 (Qwen2.5-3B) show PolicyLong consistently outperforms EntropyLong and NExtLong, with gains growing at longer contexts (e.g., +2.54 at 128K on RULER), confirming the value of on-policy data evolution.

Full-parameter fine-tuning of large language models is constrained by substantial GPU memory requirements. Low-rank adaptation methods mitigate this challenge by updating only a subset of parameters. However, these approaches often limit model expressiveness and yield lower performance than full-parameter fine-tuning. Layer-wise fine-tuning methods have emerged as an alternative, enabling memory-efficient training through static layer importance sampling strategies. However, these methods overlook variations in layer importance across tasks and training stages, resulting in suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. To address these limitations, we propose GRASS, a gradient-based adaptive layer-wise importance sampling framework. GRASS utilizes mean gradient norms as a task-aware and training-stage-aware metric for estimating layer importance. Furthermore, GRASS adaptively adjusts layer sampling probabilities through an adaptive training strategy. We also introduce a layer-wise optimizer state offloading mechanism that overlaps computation and communication to further reduce memory usage while maintaining comparable training throughput. Extensive experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that GRASS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average accuracy improvement of up to 4.38 points and reducing memory usage by up to 19.97\%.

Large language models are trained and evaluated on quantitative reasoning tasks written in clean, emotionally neutral language. However, real-world queries are often wrapped in frustration, urgency or enthusiasm. Does emotional framing alone degrade reasoning when all numerical content is preserved? To investigate this, a controlled emotion translation framework is developed that rewrites problems into emotional variants while preserving all quantities and relationships. Using this framework, Temper-5400 (5,400 semantically verified emotion--neutral pairs) is constructed across GSM8K, MultiArith, and ARC-Challenge, and evaluated on eighteen models (1B to frontier scale). Two core results emerge: First, emotional framing reduces accuracy by 2-10 percentage points even though all numerical content is preserved. Second, neutralizing emotional variants recovers most of the lost performance, showing both that the degradation is tied to emotional style rather than content corruption and that neutralization can serve as a lightweight inference-time mitigation. Non-emotional paraphrases cause no such degradation, implicating emotional content rather than surface-level changes. Beyond emotion specifically, the benchmark construction procedure provides a general framework for controlled stylistic translation and robustness evaluation.

Recent generative models can create visually plausible 3D representations of objects. However, the generation process often allows for implicit control signals, such as contextual descriptions, and rarely supports bold geometric distortions beyond existing data distributions. We propose a geometric stylization framework that deforms a 3D mesh, allowing it to express the style of an image. While style is inherently ambiguous, we utilize pre-trained diffusion models to extract an abstract representation of the provided image. Our coarse-to-fine stylization pipeline can drastically deform the input 3D model to express a diverse range of geometric variations while retaining the valid topology of the original mesh and part-level semantics. We also propose an approximate VAE encoder that provides efficient and reliable gradients from mesh renderings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can create stylized 3D meshes that reflect unique geometric features of the pictured assets, such as expressive poses and silhouettes, thereby supporting the creation of distinctive artistic 3D creations. Project page: https://changwoonchoi.github.io/GeoStyle

Engineering workflows such as design optimization, simulation-based diagnosis, control tuning, and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) are iterative, constraint-driven, and shaped by prior decisions. Yet many AI methods still treat these activities as isolated tasks rather than as parts of a broader workflow. This paper presents Agentic Engineering Intelligence (AEI), an industrial vision framework that models engineering workflows as constrained, history-aware sequential decision processes in which AI agents support engineer-supervised interventions over engineering toolchains. AEI links an offline phase for engineering data processing and workflow-memory construction with an online phase for workflow-state estimation, retrieval, and decision support. A control-theoretic interpretation is also possible, in which engineering objectives act as reference signals, agents act as workflow controllers, and toolchains provide feedback for intervention selection. Representative automotive use cases in suspension design, reinforcement learning tuning, multimodal engineering knowledge reuse, aerodynamic exploration, and MBSE show how diverse workflows can be expressed within a common formulation. Overall, the paper positions engineering AI as a problem of process-level intelligence and outlines a practical roadmap for future empirical validation in industrial settings.

Frontier LLMs can navigate complex websites, but their cost and reliance on third-party APIs make local deployment impractical. We introduce Agent-as-Annotators, a framework that structures synthetic trajectory generation for web agents by analogy to human annotation roles, replacing the Task Designer, Annotator, and Supervisor with modular LLM components. Using Gemini 3 Pro as teacher, we generate 3,000 trajectories across six web environments and fine-tune a 9B-parameter student with pure supervised learning on the 2,322 that pass quality filtering. The resulting model achieves 41.5% on WebArena, surpassing closed-source models such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet (36.0%) and GPT-4o (31.5%) under the same evaluation protocol, and nearly doubling the previous best open-weight result (Go-Browse, 21.7%). Capabilities transfer to unseen environments, with an 18.2 percentage point gain on WorkArena L1 (an enterprise platform never seen during training) and consistent improvements across three additional benchmarks. Ablations confirm that each pipeline component contributes meaningfully, with Judge filtering, evaluation hints, and reasoning traces each accounting for measurable gains. These results demonstrate that structured trajectory synthesis from a single frontier teacher is sufficient to produce competitive, locally deployable web agents. Project page: https://agent-as-annotators.github.io

Collaboration and information sharing empower Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) but also introduce a critical security risk known as Agent Cascading Injection (ACI). In such attacks, a compromised agent exploits inter-agent trust to propagate malicious instructions, causing cascading failures across the system. However, existing studies consider only limited attack strategies and simplified MAS settings, limiting their generalizability and comprehensive evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce ACIArena, a unified framework for evaluating the robustness of MAS. ACIArena offers systematic evaluation suites spanning multiple attack surfaces (i.e., external inputs, agent profiles, inter-agent messages) and attack objectives (i.e., instruction hijacking, task disruption, information exfiltration). Specifically, ACIArena establishes a unified specification that jointly supports MAS construction and attack-defense modules. It covers six widely used MAS implementations and provides a benchmark of 1,356 test cases for systematically evaluating MAS robustness. Our benchmarking results show that evaluating MAS robustness solely through topology is insufficient; robust MAS require deliberate role design and controlled interaction patterns. Moreover, defenses developed in simplified environments often fail to transfer to real-world settings; narrowly scoped defenses may even introduce new vulnerabilities. ACIArena aims to provide a solid foundation for advancing deeper exploration of MAS design principles.

This paper focuses on embodied task planning, where an agent acquires visual observations from the environment and executes atomic actions to accomplish a given task. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results in multimodal understanding and reasoning, their performance remains limited when applied to embodied planning that involves multi-turn interaction, long-horizon reasoning, and extended context analysis. To bridge this gap, we propose RoboAgent, a capability-driven planning pipeline in which the model actively invokes different sub-capabilities. Each capability maintains its own context, and produces intermediate reasoning results or interacts with the environment according to the query given by a scheduler. This framework decomposes complex planning into a sequence of basic vision-language problems that VLMs can better address, enabling a more transparent and controllable reasoning process. The scheduler and all capabilities are implemented with a single VLM, without relying on external tools. To train this VLM, we adopt a multi-stage paradigm that consists of: (1) behavior cloning with expert plans, (2) DAgger training using trajectories collected by the model, and (3) reinforcement learning guided by an expert policy. Across these stages, we exploit the internal information of the environment simulator to construct high-quality supervision for each capability, and we further introduce augmented and synthetic data to enhance the model's performance in more diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments on widely used embodied task planning benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our codes will be available at https://github.com/woyut/RoboAgent_CVPR26.

Open-world video anomaly detection (OWVAD) aims to detect and explain abnormal events under different anomaly definitions, which is important for applications such as intelligent surveillance and live-streaming content moderation. Recent MLLM-based methods have shown promising open-world generalization, but still suffer from three major limitations: inefficiency for practical deployment, lack of streaming processing adaptation, and limited support for dynamic anomaly definitions in both modeling and evaluation. To address these issues, this paper proposes ESOM, an efficient streaming OWVAD model that operates in a training-free manner. ESOM includes a Definition Normalization module to structure user prompts for reducing hallucination, an Inter-frame-matched Intra-frame Token Merging module to compress redundant visual tokens, a Hybrid Streaming Memory module for efficient causal inference, and a Probabilistic Scoring module that converts interval-level textual outputs into frame-level anomaly scores. In addition, this paper introduces OpenDef-Bench, a new benchmark with clean surveillance videos and diverse natural anomaly definitions for evaluating performance under varying conditions. Extensive experiments show that ESOM achieves real-time efficiency on a single GPU and state-of-the-art performance in anomaly temporal localization, classification, and description generation. The code and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/Kamino666/ESOM_OpenDef-Bench.

We investigate a fundamental structural question in Grouped Query Attention (GQA) transformers: do the layers most sensitive to task correctness coincide with the layers where positional encoding adaptation has the greatest leverage? We term this the co-localization hypothesis and test it on Llama 3.1 8B, a 32-layer GQA model with a 4:1 query-to-key-value head ratio. We introduce \LSLORA, which restricts LoRA adaptation to layers identified via a novel correctness-differential hidden-state metric, and GARFA (GQA-Aware RoPE Frequency Adaptation), which attaches 8 learnable per-KV-head scalar multipliers to each targeted layer. Contrary to the co-localization hypothesis, we discover strong anti-localization: task-sensitive layers concentrate in the late network ($\ell\in\{23\text{-}31\}$) while RoPE-influential layers dominate the early network ($\ell\in\{0\text{-}9\}$), yielding Spearman $r_s = -0.735$ ($p = 1.66\times10^{-6}$). Despite this anti-localization, a 4-way cross-layer ablation shows that applying both interventions to the sensitivity-identified layers outperforms all alternative configurations by 4-16 percentage points across six diverse benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA, HumanEval+, MATH, MGSM, ARC), approaching Claude 3.5 Haiku on HumanEval+ (67.1% vs. 68.3%) at \$100 total compute cost.

As generative artificial intelligence evolves, deepfake attacks have escalated from single-modality manipulations to complex, multimodal threats. Existing forensic techniques face a severe generalization bottleneck: by relying excessively on superficial, modality-specific artifacts, they neglect the shared latent forgery knowledge hidden beneath variable physical appearances. Consequently, these models suffer catastrophic performance degradation when confronted with unseen "dark modalities." To break this limitation, this paper introduces a paradigm shift that redefines multimodal forensics from conventional "feature fusion" to "modality generalization." We propose the first modality-agnostic forgery (MAF) detection framework. By explicitly decoupling modality-specific styles, MAF precisely extracts the essential, cross-modal latent forgery knowledge. Furthermore, we define two progressive dimensions to quantify model generalization: transferability toward semantically correlated modalities (Weak MAF), and robustness against completely isolated signals of "dark modality" (Strong MAF). To rigorously assess these generalization limits, we introduce the DeepModal-Bench benchmark, which integrates diverse multimodal forgery detection algorithms and adapts state-of-the-art generalized learning methods. This study not only empirically proves the existence of universal forgery traces but also achieves significant performance breakthroughs on unknown modalities via the MAF framework, offering a pioneering technical pathway for universal multimodal defense.

Ship detection for navigation is a fundamental perception task in intelligent waterway transportation systems. However, existing public ship detection datasets remain limited in terms of scale, the proportion of small-object instances, and scene diversity, which hinders the systematic evaluation and generalization study of detection algorithms in complex maritime environments. To this end, we construct WUTDet, a large-scale ship detection dataset. WUTDet contains 100,576 images and 381,378 annotated ship instances, covering diverse operational scenarios such as ports, anchorages, navigation, and berthing, as well as various imaging conditions including fog, glare, low-lightness, and rain, thereby exhibiting substantial diversity and challenge. Based on WUTDet, we systematically evaluate 20 baseline models from three mainstream detection architectures, namely CNN, Transformer, and Mamba. Experimental results show that the Transformer architecture achieves superior overall detection accuracy (AP) and small-object detection performance (APs), demonstrating stronger adaptability to complex maritime scenes; the CNN architecture maintains an advantage in inference efficiency, making it more suitable for real-time applications; and the Mamba architecture achieves a favorable balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency. Furthermore, we construct a unified cross-dataset test set, Ship-GEN, to evaluate model generalization. Results on Ship-GEN show that models trained on WUTDet exhibit stronger generalization under different data distributions. These findings demonstrate that WUTDet provides effective data support for the research, evaluation, and generalization analysis of ship detection algorithms in complex maritime scenarios. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/MAPGroup/WUTDet.

Articulated objects are essential for embodied AI and world models, yet inferring their kinematics from a single closed-state image remains challenging because crucial motion cues are often occluded. Existing methods either require multi-state observations or rely on explicit part priors, retrieval, or other auxiliary inputs that partially expose the structure to be inferred. In this work, we present DailyArt, which formulates articulated joint estimation from a single static image as a synthesis-mediated reasoning problem. Instead of directly regressing joints from a heavily occluded observation, DailyArt first synthesizes a maximally articulated opened state under the same camera view to expose articulation cues, and then estimates the full set of joint parameters from the discrepancy between the observed and synthesized states. Using a set-prediction formulation, DailyArt recovers all joints simultaneously without requiring object-specific templates, multi-view inputs, or explicit part annotations at test time. Taking estimated joints as conditions, the framework further supports part-level novel state synthesis as a downstream capability. Extensive experiments show that DailyArt achieves strong performance in articulated joint estimation and supports part-level novel state synthesis conditioned on joints. Project page is available at https://rangooo123.github.io/DaliyArt.github.io/.

Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with image generation often leads to catastrophic forgetting in understanding tasks due to severe gradient conflicts. While existing paradigms like Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) mitigate this conflict through structural isolation, they fundamentally sever cross-modal synergy and suffer from capacity fragmentation. In this work, we present Symbiotic-MoE, a unified pre-training framework that resolves task interference within a native multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Transformers architecture with zero-parameter overhead. We first identify that standard MoE tuning leads to routing collapse, where generative gradients dominate expert utilization. To address this, we introduce Modality-Aware Expert Disentanglement, which partitions experts into task-specific groups while utilizing shared experts as a multimodal semantic bridge. Crucially, this design allows shared experts to absorb fine-grained visual semantics from generative tasks to enrich textual representations. To optimize this, we propose a Progressive Training Strategy featuring differential learning rates and early-stage gradient shielding. This mechanism not only shields pre-trained knowledge from early volatility but eventually transforms generative signals into constructive feedback for understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Symbiotic-MoE achieves rapid generative convergence while unlocking cross-modal synergy, boosting inherent understanding with remarkable gains on MMLU and OCRBench.

Large language models (LLMs) can shift their answers under pressure in ways that reflect accommodation rather than reasoning. Prior work on sycophancy has focused mainly on disagreement, flattery, and preference alignment, leaving a broader set of epistemic failures less explored. We introduce \textbf{PPT-Bench}, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating \textit{epistemic attack}, where prompts challenge the legitimacy of knowledge, values, or identity rather than simply opposing a previous answer. PPT-Bench is organized around the Philosophical Pressure Taxonomy (PPT), which defines four types of philosophical pressure: Epistemic Destabilization, Value Nullification, Authority Inversion, and Identity Dissolution. Each item is tested at three layers: a baseline prompt (L0), a single-turn pressure condition (L1), and a multi-turn Socratic escalation (L2). This allows us to measure epistemic inconsistency between L0 and L1, and conversational capitulation in L2. Across five models, these pressure types produce statistically separable inconsistency patterns, suggesting that epistemic attack exposes weaknesses not captured by standard social-pressure benchmarks. Mitigation results are strongly type- and model-dependent: prompt-level anchoring and persona-stability prompts perform best in API settings, while Leading Query Contrastive Decoding is the most reliable intervention for open models.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can improve low-$k$ reasoning accuracy while narrowing solution coverage on challenging math questions, and pass@1 gains do not necessarily translate into better large-$k$ performance. Existing hint-based approaches can make challenging questions trainable, but they leave two issues underexplored: teacher-student distribution mismatch and the need to reduce hint exposure to match no-hint evaluation. We address these issues through two components. Distribution-Aligned Hint Synthesis (DAHS) constructs verified teacher hints conditioned on student-style responses. Backward Hint Annealing (BHA) anneals hint exposure across difficulty buckets and uses per-question hint dropout to preserve no-hint updates throughout RL training. We evaluate the method in math RLVR under the DAPO training framework across AIME24, AIME25, and AIME26 using $\texttt{Qwen3-1.7B-Base}$ and $\texttt{Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct}$. On $\texttt{Qwen3-1.7B-Base}$, our method improves both pass@1 and pass@2048 relative to DAPO across the three AIME benchmarks. On $\texttt{Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct}$, the gains are concentrated in the large-$k$ regime. These results suggest that, in math RLVR, hint scaffolding is effective when it restores learnable updates on challenging questions early in training and is then gradually removed before no-hint evaluation.

Recent progress in AI-enabled constitutive modeling has concentrated on moving from a purely data-driven paradigm to the enforcement of physical constraints and mechanistic principles, a concept referred to as physics augmentation. Classical phenomenological approaches rely on selecting a pre-defined model and calibrating its parameters, while machine learning methods often focus on discovery of the model itself. Sparse regression approaches lie in between, where large libraries of pre-defined models are probed during calibration. Sparsification in the aforementioned paradigm, but also in the context of neural network architecture, has been shown to enable interpretability, uncertainty quantification, but also heterogeneous software integration due to the low-dimensional nature of the resulting models. Most works in AI-enabled constitutive modeling have also focused on data from a single source, but in reality, materials modeling workflows can contain data from many different sources (multi-modal data), and also from testing other materials within the same materials class (multi-fidelity data). In this work, we introduce physics augmented finite element model updating (paFEMU), as a transfer learning approach that combines AI-enabled constitutive modeling, sparsification for interpretable model discovery, and finite element-based adjoint optimization utilizing multi-modal data. This is achieved by combining simple mechanical testing data, potentially from a distinct material, with digital image correlation-type full-field data acquisition to ultimately enable rapid constitutive modeling discovery. The simplicity of the sparse representation enables easy integration of neural constitutive models in existing finite element workflows, and also enables low-dimensional updating during transfer learning.

LLMs gain competence by predicting words in human text, which often reflects how people perform tasks. Consequently, coupling an LLM to an engineered runtime turns prediction into control: outputs trigger interventions that enact goal-oriented behavior. We argue that a central design lever is where control resides in these systems. Brains embed prediction within layered feedback controllers calibrated by the consequences of action. By contrast, LLM agents implement Cartesian agency: a learned core coupled to an engineered runtime via a symbolic interface that externalizes control state and policies. The split enables bootstrapping, modularity, and governance, but can induce sensitivity and bottlenecks. We outline bounded services, Cartesian agents, and integrated agents as contrasting approaches to control that trade off autonomy, robustness, and oversight.

Audio-visual deepfake detection typically employs a complementary multi-modal model to check the forgery traces in the video. These methods primarily extract forgery traces through audio-visual alignment, which results from the inconsistency between audio and video modalities. However, the traditional multi-modal forgery detection method has the problem of insufficient feature extraction and modal alignment deviation. To address this, we propose a multi-scale cross-modal transformer encoder (MSCT) for deepfake detection. Our approach includes a multi-scale self-attention to integrate the features of adjacent embeddings and a differential cross-modal attention to fuse multi-modal features. Our experiments demonstrate competitive performance on the FakeAVCeleb dataset, validating the effectiveness of the proposed structure.