Nonverbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter and sighs, are central to the expression of affective cues in emotional speech synthesis. However, learning diverse and contextually aligned NVs remains challenging in open settings due to limited NV data and the lack of explicit supervision. Motivated by this challenge, we propose Affectron as a framework for affective and contextually aligned NV generation. Built on a small-scale open and decoupled corpus, Affectron introduces an NV-augmented training strategy that expands the distribution of NV types and insertion locations. We further incorporate NV structural masking into a speech backbone pre-trained on purely verbal speech to enable diverse and natural NV synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that Affectron produces more expressive and diverse NVs than baseline systems while preserving the naturalness of the verbal speech stream.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive success in natural visual understanding, yet they consistently underperform in industrial anomaly detection (IAD). This is because MLLMs trained mostly on general web data differ significantly from industrial images. Moreover, they encode each image independently and can only compare images in the language space, making them insensitive to subtle visual differences that are key to IAD. To tackle these issues, we present AD-Copilot, an interactive MLLM specialized for IAD via visual in-context comparison. We first design a novel data curation pipeline to mine inspection knowledge from sparsely labeled industrial images and generate precise samples for captioning, VQA, and defect localization, yielding a large-scale multimodal dataset Chat-AD rich in semantic signals for IAD. On this foundation, AD-Copilot incorporates a novel Comparison Encoder that employs cross-attention between paired image features to enhance multi-image fine-grained perception, and is trained with a multi-stage strategy that incorporates domain knowledge and gradually enhances IAD skills. In addition, we introduce MMAD-BBox, an extended benchmark for anomaly localization with bounding-box-based evaluation. The experiments show that AD-Copilot achieves 82.3% accuracy on the MMAD benchmark, outperforming all other models without any data leakage. In the MMAD-BBox test, it achieves a maximum improvement of $3.35\times$ over the baseline. AD-Copilot also exhibits excellent generalization of its performance gains across other specialized and general-purpose benchmarks. Remarkably, AD-Copilot surpasses human expert-level performance on several IAD tasks, demonstrating its potential as a reliable assistant for real-world industrial inspection. All datasets and models will be released for the broader benefit of the community.

Speculative decoding has emerged as a powerful approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by employing lightweight draft models to propose candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model. The effectiveness of this paradigm critically depends on the quality of the draft model. While recent advances such as the EAGLE series achieve state-of-the-art speedup, existing draft models remain limited by error accumulation: they condition only on the current prefix, causing their predictions to drift from the target model over steps. In this work, we propose \textbf{ConFu} (Contemplate the Future), a novel speculative decoding framework that enables draft models to anticipate the future direction of generation. ConFu introduces (i) contemplate tokens and soft prompts that allow the draft model to leverage future-oriented signals from the target model at negligible cost, (ii) a dynamic contemplate token mechanism with MoE to enable context-aware future prediction, and (iii) a training framework with anchor token sampling and future prediction replication that learns robust future prediction. ConFu improves token acceptance rates and generation speed over EAGLE-3 by 8--11\% on Llama-3 3B/8B and by approximately 20\% on Qwen-3 4B across downstream tasks. We believe our work is the first to bridge speculative decoding with continuous reasoning tokens, offering a new direction for accelerating LLM inference.

While multimodal large language models have demonstrated impressive short-term reasoning, they struggle with long-horizon video understanding due to limited context windows and static memory mechanisms that fail to mirror human cognitive efficiency. Existing paradigms typically fall into two extremes: vision-centric methods that incur high latency and redundancy through dense visual accumulation, or text-centric approaches that suffer from detail loss and hallucination via aggressive captioning. To bridge this gap, we propose MM-Mem, a pyramidal multimodal memory architecture grounded in Fuzzy-Trace Theory. MM-Mem structures memory hierarchically into a Sensory Buffer, Episodic Stream, and Symbolic Schema, enabling the progressive distillation of fine-grained perceptual traces (verbatim) into high-level semantic schemas (gist). Furthermore, to govern the dynamic construction of memory, we derive a Semantic Information Bottleneck objective and introduce SIB-GRPO to optimize the trade-off between memory compression and task-relevant information retention. In inference, we design an entropy-driven top-down memory retrieval strategy. Extensive experiments across 4 benchmarks confirm that MM-Mem achieves state-of-the-art performance on both offline and streaming tasks, demonstrating robust generalization and validating the effectiveness of cognition-inspired memory organization. Code and associated configurations are publicly available at https://github.com/EliSpectre/MM-Mem.

Reliable object manipulation requires understanding physical properties that vary across objects and environments. Vision-language model (VLM) planners can reason about friction and stability in general terms; however, they often cannot predict how a specific ball will roll on a particular surface or which stone will provide a stable foundation without direct experience. We present PhysMem, a memory framework that enables VLM robot planners to learn physical principles from interaction at test time, without updating model parameters. The system records experiences, generates candidate hypotheses, and verifies them through targeted interaction before promoting validated knowledge to guide future decisions. A central design choice is verification before application: the system tests hypotheses against new observations rather than applying retrieved experience directly, reducing rigid reliance on prior experience when physical conditions change. We evaluate PhysMem on three real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks across four VLM backbones. On a controlled brick insertion task, principled abstraction achieves 76% success compared to 23% for direct experience retrieval, and real-world experiments show consistent improvement over 30-minute deployment sessions.

Speakers of under-represented languages face both a language barrier, as most online knowledge is in a few dominant languages, and a modality barrier, since information is largely text-based while many languages are primarily oral. We address this for French-Wolof by training the first bilingual speech-text Matryoshka embedding model, enabling efficient retrieval of French text from Wolof speech queries without relying on a costly ASR-translation pipelines. We introduce large-scale data curation pipelines and new benchmarks, compare modeling strategies, and show that modality fusion within a frozen text Matryoshka model performs best. Although trained only for retrieval, the model generalizes well to other tasks, such as speech intent detection, indicating the learning of general semantic representations. Finally, we analyze cost-accuracy trade-offs across Matryoshka dimensions and ranks, showing that information is concentrated only in a few components, suggesting potential for efficiency improvements.

Concept drift -- the change of the distribution over time -- poses significant challenges for learning systems and is of central interest for monitoring. Understanding drift is thus paramount, and drift localization -- determining which samples are affected by the drift -- is essential. While several approaches exist, most rely on local testing schemes, which tend to fail in high-dimensional, low-signal settings. In this work, we consider a fundamentally different approach based on conformal predictions. We discuss and show the shortcomings of common approaches and demonstrate the performance of our approach on state-of-the-art image datasets.

The use of large language models either as decision support systems, or in agentic workflows, is rapidly transforming the digital ecosystem. However, the understanding of LLM decision-making under uncertainty remains limited. We study LLM risky choices along two dimensions: (1) prospect representation (based on an explicit representation or outcome history) and (2) decision rationale (explanation). Our study, which involves 20 frontier and open LLMs, is complemented by a matched human subjects experiment, which provides one reference point, while an expected payoff maximizing rational agent model provides another. We find that LLMs cluster into two categories: reasoning models (RMs) and conversational models (CMs). RMs tend towards rational behavior, are insensitive to the order of prospects, gain/loss framing, and explanations, and behave similarly whether prospects are explicit or presented via a history of outcomes. CMs are significantly less rational, slightly more human-like, sensitive to prospect ordering, framing, and explanation, and exhibit a large description-history gap. Paired comparisons of open LLMs suggest that a key factor differentiating RMs and CMs is training for mathematical reasoning.

Effectively retrieving, reasoning, and understanding multimodal information remains a critical challenge for agentic systems. Traditional Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) methods rely on linear interaction histories, which struggle to handle long-context tasks, especially those involving information-sparse yet token-heavy visual data in iterative reasoning scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce VimRAG, a framework tailored for multimodal Retrieval-augmented Reasoning across text, images, and videos. Inspired by our systematic study, we model the reasoning process as a dynamic directed acyclic graph that structures the agent states and retrieved multimodal evidence. Building upon this structured memory, we introduce a Graph-Modulated Visual Memory Encoding mechanism, with which the significance of memory nodes is evaluated via their topological position, allowing the model to dynamically allocate high-resolution tokens to pivotal evidence while compressing or discarding trivial clues. To implement this paradigm, we propose a Graph-Guided Policy Optimization strategy. This strategy disentangles step-wise validity from trajectory-level rewards by pruning memory nodes associated with redundant actions, thereby facilitating fine-grained credit assignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VimRAG consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse multimodal RAG benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/VRAG.

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) has emerged as a critical paradigm for collaborative model training in privacy-sensitive domains such as finance and healthcare. However, most existing VFL frameworks rely on the idealized assumption of full sample alignment across participants, a premise that rarely holds in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, this work introduces Split-MoPE, a novel framework that integrates Split Learning with a specialized Mixture of Predefined Experts (MoPE) architecture. Unlike standard Mixture of Experts (MoE), where routing is learned dynamically, MoPE uses predefined experts to process specific data alignments, effectively maximizing data usage during both training and inference without requiring full sample overlap. By leveraging pretrained encoders for target data domains, Split-MoPE achieves state-of-the-art performance in a single communication round, significantly reducing the communication footprint compared to multi-round end-to-end training. Furthermore, unlike existing proposals that address sample misalignment, this novel architecture provides inherent robustness against malicious or noisy participants and offers per-sample interpretability by quantifying each collaborator's contribution to each prediction. Extensive evaluations on vision (CIFAR-10/100) and tabular (Breast Cancer Wisconsin) datasets demonstrate that Split-MoPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art systems such as LASER and Vertical SplitNN, particularly in challenging scenarios with high data missingness.

Large language models (LLMs) often respond even when prompts omit critical details or include misleading information, leading to hallucinations or reinforced misconceptions. We study how to evaluate and improve LLMs' ability to decide when and what to ask for clarification without sacrificing task performance. We introduce AskBench, an interactive benchmark that converts standard QA pairs into multi-turn interactions with explicit checkpoints. A unified judge loop evaluates final answers and simulates user responses as needed. AskBench covers two settings: AskMind, with intent-deficient queries requiring clarification, and AskOverconfidence, with queries containing false premises that must be identified and corrected. We further propose rubric-guided reinforcement learning with verifier-based rewards (RLVR), which uses structured rubrics to encourage targeted clarification. Experiments show consistent improvements in accuracy, rubric adherence, and interaction efficiency, with strong generalization to unseen domains.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved table understanding tasks such as Table Question Answering (TableQA), yet challenges remain in ensuring reliability, scalability, and efficiency, especially in resource-constrained or privacy-sensitive environments. In this paper, we introduce MATA, a multi-agent TableQA framework that leverages multiple complementary reasoning paths and a set of tools built with small language models. MATA generates candidate answers through diverse reasoning styles for a given table and question, then refines or selects the optimal answer with the help of these tools. Furthermore, it incorporates an algorithm designed to minimize expensive LLM agent calls, enhancing overall efficiency. MATA maintains strong performance with small, open-source models and adapts easily across various LLM types. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks of varying difficulty with ten different LLMs demonstrate that MATA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and highly efficient reasoning while avoiding excessive LLM inference. Our results highlight that careful orchestration of multiple reasoning pathways yields scalable and reliable TableQA. The code is available at https://github.com/AIDASLab/MATA.

In the field of natural language processing, some studies have attempted sentiment analysis on text by handling emotions as explanatory or response variables. One of the most popular emotion models used in this context is the wheel of emotion proposed by Plutchik. This model schematizes human emotions in a circular structure, and represents them in two or three dimensions. However, the validity of Plutchik's wheel of emotion has not been sufficiently examined. This study investigated the validity of the wheel by creating and analyzing a semantic networks of emotion words. Through our experiments, we collected data of similarity and association of ordered pairs of emotion words, and constructed networks using these data. We then analyzed the structure of the networks through community detection, and compared it with that of the wheel of emotion. The results showed that each network's structure was, for the most part, similar to that of the wheel of emotion, but locally different.

The prediction of 3D semantic occupancy enables autonomous vehicles (AVs) to perceive the fine-grained geometric and semantic scene structure for safe navigation and decision-making. Existing methods mainly rely on either voxel-based representations, which incur redundant computation over empty regions, or on object-centric Gaussian primitives, which are limited in modeling complex, non-convex, and asymmetric structures. In this paper, we present TFusionOcc, a T-primitive-based object-centric multi-sensor fusion framework for 3D semantic occupancy prediction. Specifically, we introduce a family of Students t-distribution-based T-primitives, including the plain T-primitive, T-Superquadric, and deformable T-Superquadric with inverse warping, where the deformable T-Superquadric serves as the key geometry-enhancing primitive. We further develop a unified probabilistic formulation based on the Students t-distribution and the T-mixture model (TMM) to jointly model occupancy and semantics, and design a tightly coupled multi-stage fusion architecture to effectively integrate camera and LiDAR cues. Extensive experiments on nuScenes show state-of-the-art performance, while additional evaluations on nuScenes-C demonstrate strong robustness under most corruption scenarios. The code will be available at: https://github.com/DanielMing123/TFusionOcc

Vision-language models (VLMs) can achieve high accuracy while still accepting culturally plausible but visually incorrect interpretations. Existing hallucination benchmarks rarely test this failure mode, particularly outside Western contexts and English. We introduce M$^2$CQA, a culturally grounded multimodal benchmark built from images spanning 17 MENA countries, paired with contrastive true and counterfactual statements in English, Arabic, and its dialects. To isolate hallucination beyond raw accuracy, we propose the CounterFactual Hallucination Rate (CFHR), which measures counterfactual acceptance conditioned on correctly answering the true statement. Evaluating state-of-the-art VLMs under multiple prompting strategies, we find that CFHR rises sharply in Arabic, especially in dialects, even when true-statement accuracy remains high. Moreover, reasoning-first prompting consistently increases counterfactual hallucination, while answering before justifying improves robustness. We make the dataset publicly available for the community (https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/M2CQA)).

We introduce ChemPro, a progressive benchmark with 4100 natural language question-answer pairs in Chemistry, across 4 coherent sections of difficulty designed to assess the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in a broad spectrum of general chemistry topics. We include Multiple Choice Questions and Numerical Questions spread across fine-grained information recall, long-horizon reasoning, multi-concept questions, problem-solving with nuanced articulation, and straightforward questions in a balanced ratio, effectively covering Bio-Chemistry, Inorganic-Chemistry, Organic-Chemistry and Physical-Chemistry. ChemPro is carefully designed analogous to a student's academic evaluation for basic to high-school chemistry. A gradual increase in the question difficulty rigorously tests the ability of LLMs to progress from solving basic problems to solving more sophisticated challenges. We evaluate 45+7 state-of-the-art LLMs, spanning both open-source and proprietary variants, and our analysis reveals that while LLMs perform well on basic chemistry questions, their accuracy declines with different types and levels of complexity. These findings highlight the critical limitations of LLMs in general scientific reasoning and understanding and point towards understudied dimensions of difficulty, emphasizing the need for more robust methodologies to improve LLMs.

Why do neural networks fail to generalize addition from 16-digit to 32-digit numbers, while a child who learns the rule can apply it to arbitrarily long sequences? We argue that this failure is not an engineering problem but a violation of physical postulates. Drawing inspiration from physics, we identify three constraints that any generalizing system must satisfy: (1) Locality -- information propagates at finite speed; (2) Symmetry -- the laws of computation are invariant across space and time; (3) Stability -- the system converges to discrete attractors that resist noise accumulation. From these postulates, we derive -- rather than design -- the Spatiotemporal Evolution with Attractor Dynamics (SEAD) architecture: a neural cellular automaton where local convolutional rules are iterated until convergence. Experiments on three tasks validate our theory: (1) Parity -- demonstrating perfect length generalization via light-cone propagation; (2) Addition -- achieving scale-invariant inference from L=16 to L=1 million with 100% accuracy, exhibiting input-adaptive computation; (3) Rule 110 -- learning a Turing-complete cellular automaton without trajectory divergence. Our results suggest that the gap between statistical learning and logical reasoning can be bridged -- not by scaling parameters, but by respecting the physics of computation.

Search-engine date filters are widely used to enforce pre-cutoff retrieval in retrospective evaluations of search-augmented forecasters. We show this approach is unreliable across two major search engines: auditing Google Search's before: filter and DuckDuckGo's date-range filter, we find that at least one retrieved page contains major post-cutoff leakage for 71% of questions on Google and 81% on DuckDuckGo, and the answer is directly revealed for 41% and 55%, respectively. Using gpt-oss-120b to forecast with these leaky documents, we demonstrate inflated prediction accuracy (Brier score 0.10 vs. 0.24 with leak-free documents). We characterize recurring leakage mechanisms, including updated articles, related-content modules, unreliable metadata, and absence-based signals, and argue that date-restricted search on these engines is insufficient for credible retrospective evaluation. We recommend stronger retrieval safeguards or evaluation on frozen, time-stamped web snapshots.

The robust safety of Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) against joint multilingual and multimodal threats remains severely underexplored. Current benchmarks typically isolate these dimensions, being either multilingual but text-only, or multimodal but monolingual. While recent red-teaming efforts attempt to bridge this gap by rendering harmful prompts as images, their overreliance on typography-style visuals and lack of semantically grounded image-text pairs fail to capture realistic cross-modal interactions under multilingual and multimodal conditions. To address this, we introduce Lingua-SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark of 100,440 harmful image-text pairs spanning 10 languages. Crucially, Lingua-SafetyBench explicitly partitions data into image-dominant and text-dominant subsets to precisely disentangle sources of risk. Extensive evaluations reveal that current VLLMs retain non-negligible vulnerabilities under these joint inputs. Linguistically, requests in Non-High-Resource Languages (Non-HRLs) and non-Latin scripts generally pose greater threats. Furthermore, analyzing modality-language interactions uncovers a striking asymmetry: in High-Resource Languages (HRLs), models are most vulnerable to image-dominant risks, whereas in Non-HRLs, text-dominant risks severely degrade safety performance. Finally, a controlled study on the Qwen series demonstrates that while model scaling and iterative upgrades improve overall safety, they disproportionately benefit HRLs. This exacerbates the safety disparity between HRLs and Non-HRLs under text-dominant risks, highlighting that achieving robust safety requires dedicated language- and modality-aware alignment strategies beyond mere scaling. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/zsxr15/Lingua-SafetyBench.Warning: this paper contains examples with unsafe content.

Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) is inherently challenging, as it requires sophisticated reasoning over dynamic facts with multi-hop dependencies and complex temporal constraints. Existing methods rely on fixed workflows and expensive closed-source APIs, limiting flexibility and scalability. We propose Temp-R1, the first autonomous end-to-end agent for TKGQA trained through reinforcement learning. To address cognitive overload in single-action reasoning, we expand the action space with specialized internal actions alongside external action. To prevent shortcut learning on simple questions, we introduce reverse curriculum learning that trains on difficult questions first, forcing the development of sophisticated reasoning before transferring to easier cases. Our 8B-parameter Temp-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on MultiTQ and TimelineKGQA, improving 19.8% over strong baselines on complex questions. Our work establishes a new paradigm for autonomous temporal reasoning agents. The code is available at https://github.com/zjukg/Temp-R1.

LLM agents are increasingly used for social simulation, yet emotion is often treated as a transient cue, causing emotional amnesia and weak long-horizon continuity. We present Sentipolis, a framework for emotionally stateful agents that integrates continuous Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) representation, dual-speed emotion dynamics, and emotion--memory coupling. Across thousands of interactions over multiple base models and evaluators, Sentipolis improves emotionally grounded behavior, boosting communication, and emotional continuity. Gains are model-dependent: believability increases for higher-capacity models but can drop for smaller ones, and emotion-awareness can mildly reduce adherence to social norms, reflecting a human-like tension between emotion-driven behavior and rule compliance in social simulation. Network-level diagnostics show reciprocal, moderately clustered, and temporally stable relationship structures, supporting the study of cumulative social dynamics such as alliance formation and gradual relationship change.

Quantifying the causal relationship between sea ice thickness and sea surface height (SSH) is essential for understanding the mechanisms driving polar climate change and global sea-level rise. Conventional deep learning models often struggle with treatment effect estimation in climate settings due to time-varying confounding and the lack of physical constraints. To address these challenges, we propose the Knowledge-Guided Causal Model Variational Autoencoder (KGCM-VAE) to quantify the effect of SSH on sea ice thickness. The framework leverages established physical relationships between SSH and surface velocity to generate physically grounded, time-varying continuous treatments, where each treatment value can change at every time step within a sequence. The model also incorporates Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to balance treated and control distributions in the latent space, mitigating observed confounding bias. Using synthetic data, we evaluated the model's ability to predict sea ice thickness responses under hypothetical SSH forcing scenarios, demonstrating that KGCM-VAE achieves superior PEHE compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Ablation studies further confirm that MMD consistently enhances treatment effect estimation over the base model. Additionally, we conducted a real-world case study to examine the sensitivity of physical parameters to specific treatments and to compare these findings with an existing modeling study.

Large language models are increasingly used to represent human opinions, values, or beliefs, and their steerability towards these ideals is an active area of research. Existing work focuses predominantly on aligning marginal response distributions, treating each alignment evaluation example independently. While essential, this may overlook deeper latent structures that characterise real populations and underpin cultural values theories. We propose a framework for evaluating the \textit{representativeness} of aligned models through multivariate correlation patterns in addition to marginal distributions. We show the value of our evaluation scheme by comparing two model steering techniques (persona prompting and demographic fine-tuning) and evaluating them against human responses from the World Values Survey. While the demographic fine-tuned model better approximates marginal response distributions, persona prompting performs marginally better at reproducing the empirical correlation structure between survey items. Despite this reversal, neither technique aligns with human correlation patterns. We conclude that representativeness is a distinct aspect of value alignment and an evaluation focused on marginals can mask structural failures, leading to overly optimistic conclusions about model representativeness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit social biases, which can lead to harmful stereotypes and unfair outcomes. We propose \textbf{Multi-Persona Thinking (MPT)}, a simple inference-time framework that reduces social bias by encouraging reasoning from multiple perspectives. MPT guides the model to consider contrasting social identities, such as male and female, together with a neutral viewpoint. These viewpoints then interact through an iterative reasoning process to identify and correct biased judgments. This design transforms the potential weakness of persona assignment into a mechanism to mitigate bias. We evaluate MPT on two widely used bias benchmarks with both open-source and closed-source models. Our results show that MPT achieves a lower bias than the existing prompting-based methods while maintaining the core reasoning ability.

In narrow, unstructured underwater environments such as environmental monitoring and minimally invasive medical procedures, micro soft robots exhibit unique advantages due to their flexible movement capabilities and small size. At the same time, applying bionic technology to the structural design of micro soft robots can significantly improve their swimming performance. However, limited by their miniaturization, these robots are difficult to power internally and usually adopt a wireless power supply method. This study designs and fabricates a magnetically responsive, cownose ray-inspired micro soft robot based on the swimming principle of the cownose ray. The robot is made of a certain proportion of NdFeB and PDMS. Then, a three-dimensional Helmholtz coil is used to generate an oscillating harmonic magnetic field to conduct swimming experiments on the robot, exploring the influence of magnetic field parameters on the robot's swimming performance. The experimental results show that the swimming speed is the fastest at B = 5 mT and f = 11 Hz, reaching 5.25 mm/s, which is about 0.5 body lengths per second. In addition, by adjusting the current direction and frequency of the coil, the robot can perform different swimming modes such as straight swimming, turning swimming, and directional swimming. By employing a stepwise adjustment method, the impact of response errors on the robot's trajectory can be effectively reduced. This study demonstrates a method for magnetically driven micro soft robots, laying a foundation for the application of wireless-driven robots in underwater narrow spaces.

In recent years, the non-deterministic properties of language models have garnered considerable attention and have shown a significant influence on real-world applications. However, such properties remain under-explored in machine translation (MT), a complex, non-deterministic NLP task. In this study, we systematically evaluate modern MT systems and identify temperature-constrained Non-Deterministic MT (ND-MT) as a distinct phenomenon. Additionally, we demonstrate that ND-MT exhibits significant potential in addressing the multimodality issue that has long challenged MT research and provides higher-quality candidates than Deterministic MT (D-MT) under temperature constraints. However, ND-MT introduces new challenges in evaluating system performance. Specifically, the evaluation framework designed for D-MT fails to yield consistent evaluation results when applied to ND-MT. We further investigate this emerging challenge by evaluating state-of-the-art ND-MT systems using both lexical-based and semantic-based metrics at varying sampling sizes. The results reveal a Buckets Effect across these systems: the ranking of ND-MT systems is dominated by the worst-quality candidate translation, as shown by automatic evaluation metrics. To mitigate this issue, we propose ExpectoSample, a strategy that first identifies reliable metrics and then enables robust ND-MT system selection for real-world.

Current research workflows for precise video segmentation are often forced into a compromise between labor-intensive manual curation, costly commercial platforms, and/or privacy-compromising cloud-based services. The demand for high-fidelity video instance segmentation in research is often hindered by the bottleneck of manual annotation and the privacy concerns of cloud-based tools. We present SAMannot, an open-source, local framework that integrates the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) into a human-in-the-loop workflow. To address the high resource requirements of foundation models, we modified the SAM2 dependency and implemented a processing layer that minimizes computational overhead and maximizes throughput, ensuring a highly responsive user interface. Key features include persistent instance identity management, an automated ``lock-and-refine'' workflow with barrier frames, and a mask-skeletonization-based auto-prompting mechanism. SAMannot facilitates the generation of research-ready datasets in YOLO and PNG formats alongside structured interaction logs. Verified through animal behavior tracking use-cases and subsets of the LVOS and DAVIS benchmark datasets, the tool provides a scalable, private, and cost-effective alternative to commercial platforms for complex video annotation tasks.

Standardized math assessments require expensive human pilot studies to establish the difficulty of test items. We investigate the predictive value of open-source large language models (LLMs) for evaluating the difficulty of multiple-choice math questions for real-world students. We show that, while LLMs are poor direct judges of problem difficulty, simulation-based approaches with LLMs yield promising results under the right conditions. Under the proposed approach, we simulate a ``classroom'' of 4th, 8th, or 12th-grade students by prompting the LLM to role-play students of varying proficiency levels. We use the outcomes of these simulations to fit Item Response Theory (IRT) models, comparing learned difficulty parameters for items to their real-world difficulties, as determined by item-level statistics furnished by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We observe correlations as high as 0.75, 0.76, and 0.82 for grades 4, 8, and 12, respectively, on the item-level correctness rates. In our simulations, we experiment on math MCQs with different ``classroom sizes,'' showing tradeoffs between computation size and accuracy. We find that role-plays with diverse-named students improve predictions (compared to student IDs), and stratifying names across gender and race further improves predictions. Our results show that LLMs with relatively weaker mathematical abilities (Gemma) actually yield better real-world difficulty predictions than mathematically stronger models (Llama and Qwen), further underscoring the suitability of these models for the task.

We demonstrate SAGE-32B, a 32 billion parameter language model that focuses on agentic reasoning and long range planning tasks. Unlike chat models that aim for general conversation fluency, SAGE-32B is designed to operate in an agentic loop, emphasizing task decomposition, tool usage, and error recovery. The model is initialized from the Qwen2.5-32B pretrained model and fine tuned using Iterative Distillation, a two stage training process that improves reasoning performance through rigorously tested feedback loops. SAGE-32B also introduces an inverse reasoning approach, which uses a meta cognition head to forecast potential failures in the planning process before execution. On agentic reasoning benchmarks including MMLU-Pro, AgentBench, and MATH-500, SAGE-32B achieves higher success rates in multi tool usage scenarios compared to similarly sized baseline models, while remaining competitive on standard reasoning evaluations. Model weights are publicly released at https://huggingface.co/sagea-ai/sage-reasoning-32b

Large language models solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, achieving higher accuracy at the cost of increased computational cost and reduced ability to isolate functionally relevant reasoning. Prior work on compact reasoning shortens such chains through probabilistic sampling, heuristics, or supervision from frontier models, but offers limited insight into whether models internally encode token-level functional importance for answer generation. We address this gap diagnostically and propose greedy pruning, a likelihood-preserving deletion procedure that iteratively removes reasoning tokens whose removal minimally degrades model likelihood under a specified objective, yielding length-controlled reasoning chains. We evaluate pruned reasoning in a distillation framework and show that students trained on pruned chains outperform a frontier-model-supervised compression baseline at matched reasoning lengths. Finally, our analysis reveals systematic pruning patterns and shows that attention scores can predict greedy pruning ranks, further suggesting that models encode a nontrivial functional importance structure over reasoning tokens.