When a tool-calling agent picks the wrong tool, the failure is invisible until execution: the email gets sent, the meeting gets missed. As agents take on consequential actions, one bad tool call can do real damage. We currently have no way to look inside the model and catch the mistake before it happens; this paper shows that we can. Inside the model, the choice of tool is carried by a single direction in activation space, one direction per pair of tools. Adding that direction during generation switches which tool the model picks. Across 12 instruction-tuned and 6 base models spanning Gemma 3, Qwen 3, Qwen 2.5, and Llama 3.1 (270M to 27B), this works at 83-100% accuracy on 4B+ instruction-tuned models on a 15-tool synthetic benchmark and at 77-94% on the real-API benchmark $τ$-bench airline. The JSON arguments that follow automatically adapt to the new tool's schema, so flipping the name is enough. The same per-tool directions also flag likely errors before they happen: queries where the model is unsure between two tools fail 21x more often than queries where it is not (Gemma 3 27B). This is not just topic injection: random vectors at the same magnitude give a 0% switch rate, and a probe within a single domain (14 airline tools that share one topic) still reads which tool the model will call at top-1 61-89% across five 4B-14B models. Even base models already carry the right tool internally before they can emit it: reading the chosen tool off the model's internal state (cosine readout) recovers 61-82% accuracy on BFCL while base generation lands at 2-10%, suggesting pretraining forms the representation and instruction tuning later wires it to the output. Our results cover single-turn, fixed-menu settings; on multi-turn agent loops the same intervention is less stable (matched-baseline gain or loss of up to 30 percentage points with no consistent direction).

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as surrogates for human participants, but it remains unclear which models best capture human behavior and why. To address this, we introduce Psych-201, a novel dataset that enables us to measure behavioral alignment at scale. We find that post-training -- the stage that turns base models into useful assistants -- consistently reduces alignment with human behavior across model families, sizes, and objectives. Moreover, this misalignment widens in newer model generations even as base models continue to improve. Finally, we find that persona-induction -- a popular technique for eliciting human-like behavior by conditioning models on participant-specific information -- does not improve predictions at the level of individuals. Taken together, our results suggest that the very processes that are currently employed to turn LLMs into useful assistants also make them less accurate models of human behavior.

Current computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) methods often treat retrosynthesis as solved once a single feasible route is identified, focusing primarily on convergence or shortest-path metrics. This view is misaligned with real-world practice, where chemists must balance competing objectives such as cost, sustainability, toxicity, and overall yield. To address this, we formulate synthesis planning as a multi-objective search problem and introduce MORetro*, an algorithm that generates a Pareto front of synthesis routes to explicitly capture trade-offs among user-defined criteria. MORetro* uses weighted scalarization and BO-informed sampling to efficiently navigate the combinatorial search space and prioritize promising trade-offs. Building on multi-objective A*-search, we provide optimality guarantees showing that, for a fixed single-step model, MORetro* recovers the true Pareto front under admissibility. Across multiple retrosynthesis benchmarks, MORetro* produces diverse, high-quality Pareto fronts, uncovering solutions overlooked by single-objective approaches and better aligning CASP outputs with industrial decision-making.

Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have demonstrated the feasibility of self-driving scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, most existing methods either rely solely on cameras or use LiDAR only for Gaussian initialization or depth supervision, while the rich scene information contained in point clouds, such as reflectance, and the complementarity between LiDAR and RGB have not been fully exploited, leading to degradation in challenging self-driving scenes, such as those with high ego-motion and complex lighting. To address these issues, we propose a robust and efficient LiDAR-reflectance-guided Salient Gaussian Splatting method (LR-SGS) for self-driving scenes, which introduces a structure-aware Salient Gaussian representation, initialized from geometric and reflectance feature points extracted from LiDAR and refined through a salient transform and improved density control to capture edge and planar structures. Furthermore, we calibrate LiDAR intensity into reflectance and attach it to each Gaussian as a lighting-invariant material channel, jointly aligned with RGB to enforce boundary consistency. Extensive experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that LR-SGS achieves superior reconstruction performance with fewer Gaussians and shorter training time. In particular, on Complex Lighting scenes, our method surpasses OmniRe by 1.18 dB PSNR.

Benchmarks like GSM8K are popular measures of mathematical reasoning, but leaderboard gains can overstate true capability due to memorization of fixed test sets. Most robustness variants apply surface-level perturbations (paraphrases, renamings, number swaps, distractors) that largely preserve the underlying facts, and static releases can themselves become memorization targets over time. We introduce GSM-SEM, a reusable and stochastic framework for generating semantically diverse benchmark variants with substantially higher semantic variance than prior approaches. GSM-SEM perturbs problem statements by modifying entities, attributes, and/or relationships, frequently altering underlying facts and requiring models to recompute solutions under new conditions, while constraining generation to preserve the original calculations/answer and approximate problem difficulty. GSM-SEM generates fresh variants on each run without requiring re-annotation, reducing reliance on static public benchmarks for evaluation and thereby lowering the bias of memorization. We apply GSM-SEM on GSM8K and two existing variation suites (GSM-Symbolic and GSM-Plus), producing GSM8K-SEM, GSM-Symbolic-SEM, and GSM-Plus-SEM. Evaluating 14 SOTA LLMs, we observe consistent performance drops with larger decline when semantic perturbations are coupled with symbolic/plus variations (average drop rate 28% in maximum strictness configuration of GSM-SEM). We publicly release the three SEM variants as fully human-validated datasets. Finally, to demonstrate applicability beyond GSM-style math problems, we apply GSM-SEM to additional benchmarks including BigBenchHard, LogicBench, and NLR-BIRD.

Software systems built from versioned AI components increasingly need lifecycle-time governance: when a capability module evolves into a new version, the hosting system must decide whether the new version may be activated safely, under what deployment conditions it should run, how it must be monitored, and when it should be rolled back. Existing software-deployment patterns (canary release, blue-green, feature flags, and MLOps pipelines) address parts of this loop but were designed for stateless web services rather than for stateful, policy-constrained runtimes that drive AI components in the field. We formulate governed capability evolution as a first-class software-lifecycle problem for AI-component-based systems and propose a staged upgrade framework in which every new capability version is treated as a governed deployment candidate rather than an immediately executable replacement. The framework introduces four upgrade compatibility checks (interface, policy, behavioral, recovery) and organizes them into a seven-stage pipeline (candidate validation, sandbox evaluation, shadow deployment, gated activation, online monitoring, rollback, audit). We implement a reference prototype on a PyBullet manipulation testbed with ROS 2 middleware and evaluate it over 6 rounds of capability upgrade with 15 random seeds. Naive upgrade achieves 72.9% task success but drives unsafe activation to 60% by the final round; governed upgrade retains comparable success (67.4%) while maintaining zero unsafe activations across all rounds (Wilcoxon p=0.003). Shadow deployment reveals 40% of upgrade regressions invisible to sandbox evaluation alone, and rollback succeeds in 79.8% of post-activation drift scenarios.

We introduce boundary quotients and present a framework for learning densities on manifolds that arise as boundary quotients of simpler domains. We show that this framework can be used to construct normalizing flows on quotient manifolds $N/G$, where a discrete group $G$ acts on $N$. We instantiate this construction for genus-$g$ surfaces $Σ_g$. When $G$ is finite, we show applicability to symmetry aware learning; we demonstrate this on cyclic quotients of the 3-sphere. Experiments on lens spaces show that simple pre-quotient RealNVP models can achieve strong results while being substantially cheaper to evaluate.

Many static benchmarks are beginning to saturate: as models rapidly improve, they achieve near-perfect scores on fixed test sets, leaving little headroom to expose genuine model weaknesses -- and even expert-curated challenge sets quickly saturate after hillclimbing. We present a fully automatic framework that searches the Internet at scale to construct challenging benchmarks without human curation. The key insight is to model the Internet as a vast space of topics and formalize the search as a multi-armed bandit problem, where each topic's difficulty is revealed only through expensive sample-and-evaluate queries. Our epsilon-greedy strategy identifies the most challenging topics while exploring only 6% of the search space -- a 100 times cost reduction over exhaustive evaluation. We validate on machine translation and knowledge question answering, confirming that discovered difficulty is robust across independent metrics (GEMBA-SQA and MetricX), languages, and models.

Frontier scientific reasoning is rapidly emerging as a key foundation for advancing AI agents in automated scientific discovery. Deep research agents offer a promising approach to this challenge. These models develop robust problem-solving capabilities through post-training on information-seeking tasks, which are typically curated via knowledge graph construction or iterative web browsing. However, these strategies face inherent limitations in frontier science, where domain-specific knowledge is scattered across sparse and heterogeneous academic sources, and problem solving requires sophisticated computation and reasoning far beyond factual recall. To bridge this gap, we introduce SciResearcher, a fully automated agentic framework for frontier-science data construction. SciResearcher synthesizes diverse conceptual and computational tasks grounded in academic evidence, while eliciting information acquisition, tool-integrated reasoning, and long-horizon capabilities. Leveraging the curated data for supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, we develop SciResearcher-8B, an agent foundation model that achieves 19.46% on the HLE-Bio/Chem-Gold benchmark, establishing a new state of the art at its parameter scale and surpassing several larger proprietary agents. It further achieves 13-15% absolute gains on SuperGPQA-Hard-Biology and TRQA-Literature benchmarks. Overall, SciResearcher introduces a new paradigm for automated data construction for frontier scientific reasoning and offers a scalable path toward future scientific agents.

Scaling laws enable the optimal selection of data amount and language model size, yet the impact of the data unit, the token, on this relationship remains underexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate how the information granularity of tokens, controlled by the compression rate (i.e., average bytes of text per token), affects scaling trends. We train 988 latent tokenized models (BLT) ranging from 50M to 7B parameters that enable setting the desired compression rate. This flexibility allows us to study the role of compression rate well beyond 4.57 bytes per token obtained with a popular BPE tokenizer. Our experiments reveal that in compute-optimal configurations, model parameter counts scale proportionally to data size measured in bytes, not in tokens as commonly perceived (Kaplan et al., 2020; Hoffmann et al., 2022). Furthermore, we discover that the optimal compression rate differs from the one obtained with BPE and decreases with compute. These findings generalize to both latent and subword tokenization, as well as to languages other than English, guiding language model developers on tokenization scheme selection for maximal compute efficiency.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their massive scale poses significant challenges for practical deployment. Structured pruning offers a promising solution by removing entire dimensions or layers, yet existing methods face critical trade-offs: task-agnostic approaches cannot adapt to task-specific requirements, while task-aware methods require costly training to learn task adaptability. We propose DIET (Dimension-wise global pruning of LLMs via merging Task-wise importance scores), a training-free structured pruning method that combines dimension-level granularity with task-aware selection. DIET profiles activation magnitudes across tasks using only 100 samples per task, then applies majority voting to construct a single global mask. DIET does not require large costs from pre-computation or training. Experiments on seven zero-shot benchmarks using Gemma-2 2B and 9B models demonstrate the effectiveness of DIET; for example, at 20% sparsity on Gemma-2 2B, DIET achieves near 10% average accuracy improvement, compared to previous state-of-the-art structured pruning methods. This advantage persists across various sparsity levels and model scales, positioning DIET as a practical and robust choice for structured LLM pruning.

Recent work has explored optimizing LLM collaboration through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). However, most MARL fine-tuning approaches rely on predefined execution protocols, which often require centralized execution. Decentralized LLM collaboration is more appealing in practice, as agents can run inference in parallel with flexible deployments. Also, current approaches use Monte Carlo methods for fine-tuning, which suffer from high variance and thus require more samples to train effectively. Actor-critic methods are prevalent in MARL for dealing with these issues; thus, we developed Multi-Agent Actor-Critic (MAAC) methods to optimize decentralized LLM collaboration. In this paper, we analyze when and why these MAAC methods are beneficial. We propose 2 MAAC approaches, \textbf{CoLLM-CC} with a \textbf{C}entralized \textbf{C}ritic and \textbf{CoLLM-DC} with \textbf{D}ecentralized \textbf{C}ritics. Our experiments across writing, coding, and game-playing domains show that Monte Carlo methods and CoLLM-DC can achieve performance comparable to CoLLM-CC in short-horizon and dense-reward settings. However, they both underperform CoLLM-CC on long-horizon or sparse-reward tasks, where Monte Carlo methods require substantially more samples and CoLLM-DC struggles to converge.

World models have recently re-emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, and model-based reinforcement learning. However, current world model research is often dominated by three partially separated routes: 2D video-generative models that emphasize visual future synthesis, 3D scene-centric models that emphasize spatial reconstruction, and JEPA-like latent models that emphasize abstract predictive representations. While each route has made important progress, they still struggle to provide physically reliable, action-controllable, and long-horizon stable predictions for embodied decision making. In this paper, we argue that the bottleneck of world models is no longer only whether they can generate realistic futures, but whether those futures are physically meaningful and useful for action. We propose \emph{Hamiltonian World Models} as a physically grounded perspective on world modeling. The key idea is to encode observations into a structured latent phase space, evolve the latent state through Hamiltonian-inspired dynamics with control, dissipation, and residual terms, decode the predicted trajectory into future observations, and use the resulting rollouts for planning. We discuss how Hamiltonian structure may improve interpretability, data efficiency, and long-horizon stability, while also noting practical challenges in real-world robotic scenes involving friction, contact, non-conservative forces, and deformable objects.

We introduce SPUR, a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. SPUR features three key innovations: (1) Panel-Level Fine-Grained Perception: evaluating the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) across three dimensions (numerical, morphological, and information localization) on six fine-grained panel types; (2) Cross-Panel Relation Understanding: utilizing complex images with an average of 14.3 panels per sample to evaluate MLLMs' ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations; (3) Expert-Level Reasoning: assessment of qualitative and quantitative reasoning across five experimental paradigms to determine if models can infer conclusions from evidence as human experts do. Comprehensive evaluation of 20 MLLMs and four multimodal Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) methods reveals that current models fall significantly short of the expert-level requirements for scientific image interpretation, underscoring a critical bottleneck in AI for Science (AI4S) research.

Every system that performs effects has two boundaries: what it can do (expressiveness) and what governance covers (governance). In nearly all deployed AI systems, these boundaries are defined independently, creating three regions: governed capabilities (the only useful region), ungoverned capabilities (risk), and governance policies that address non-existent capabilities (theater). Two of the three regions are failure modes. We focus on the governance of effects: actions that AI systems perform in the world (API calls, database writes, tool invocations). This is distinct from the governance of model outputs (content quality, bias, fairness), which operates at a different level and requires different mechanisms. We present a formal framework for analyzing this structural gap. Rice's theorem (1953) proves the gap is undecidable in the general case for any Turing-complete architecture that attempts to govern effects behaviorally: no algorithm can decide non-trivial semantic properties of arbitrary programs, including the property "this program's effects comply with the governance policy." We define coterminous governance: a system property where the expressivenessboundary equals the governance boundary. We show that coterminous governance requires an architectural decision (separatingcomputation from effect) rather than a governance layer added after the fact. We show that structural governance under this separation subsumes separate governance infrastructure: governance checks become part of the execution pipeline rather than a second system running alongside it. We propose coterminous governance as the testable criterion for any AI governance system: either the two boundaries are provably identical, or risk and theater are structurally inevitable. Proofs are mechanized in Coq (454 theorems, 36 modules, 0 admitted).

We present five results in the theory of structural governance for cognitive workflow systems. Three are mechanized in Coq 8.19 using the Interaction Trees library with parameterized coinduction; two are proved on paper with explicit reductions. The Coinductive Safety Predicate (gov_safe) is a coinductive property that captures governance safety for infinite program behaviors, indexed by a boolean permission flag that is provably false for ungoverned I/O and true for governed interpretations (mechanized). The Governance Invariance Theorem establishes that governance is uniform across the meta-recursive tower: governance at level n+1 reduces to governance at level n by definitional equality of the type (mechanized). The Sufficiency Theorem proves that four atomic primitives (code, reason, memory, call) are expressively complete for any discrete intelligent system, formalized as compositional closure of a Kleisli category (mechanized). The Alternating Normal Form provides a canonical decomposition of any machine into alternating code and effect layers, with a confluent rewriting system (paper proof). The Necessity Theorem proves via explicit reduction to Rice's theorem that an architecturally opaque component (the reason primitive) is mathematically necessary for problems requiring semantic judgment (paper proof). A sixth contribution connects the abstract model to the deployed runtime: the Verified Interpreter Specification formalizes the BEAM runtime's trust, capability, and hash chain logic in Coq, then tests the running system against this specification using property-based testing with over 70,000 randomly generated directive sequences and zero disagreements. The mechanization comprises approximately 12,000 lines across 36 modules with 454 theorems and zero admitted lemmas.

Recent video foundation models demonstrate impressive visual synthesis but frequently suffer from geometric inconsistencies. While existing methods attempt to inject 3D priors via architectural modifications, they often incur high computational costs and limit scalability. We propose World-R1, a framework that aligns video generation with 3D constraints through reinforcement learning. To facilitate this alignment, we introduce a specialized pure text dataset tailored for world simulation. Utilizing Flow-GRPO, we optimize the model using feedback from pre-trained 3D foundation models and vision-language models to enforce structural coherence without altering the underlying architecture. We further employ a periodic decoupled training strategy to balance rigid geometric consistency with dynamic scene fluidity. Extensive evaluations reveal that our approach significantly enhances 3D consistency while preserving the original visual quality of the foundation model, effectively bridging the gap between video generation and scalable world simulation.

This article introduces two new measures for authorship attribution - Rank-Turbulence Delta and Jensen-Shannon Delta - which generalise Burrows's classical Delta by applying distance functions designed for probabilistic distributions. We first set out the theoretical basis of the measures, contrasting centred and uncentred z-scoring of word-frequency vectors and re-casting the uncentred vectors as probability distributions. Building on this representation, we develop a token-level decomposition that renders every Delta distance numerically interpretable, thereby facilitating close reading and the validation of results. The effectiveness of the methods is assessed on four literary corpora in English, German, French and Russian. The English, German and French datasets are compiled from Project Gutenberg, whereas the Russian benchmark is the SOCIOLIT corpus containing 639 works by 89 authors spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Rank-Turbulence Delta attains attribution accuracy comparable with Cosine Delta; Jensen-Shannon Delta consistently matches or exceeds the performance of canonical Burrows's Delta. Finally, several established attribution algorithms are re-evaluated on the extended SOCIOLIT corpus, providing a realistic estimate of their robustness under pronounced temporal and stylistic variation.

Adapting CLIP for videos has gained popularity due to its semantic and rich representation. While CLIP is a good starting point, it typically undergoes post-pretraining (contrastive finetuning) on large video narration or caption datasets (e.g. HowTo100M, WebVid2.5M). However, such narrations or captions often lack comprehensive information needed to represent a video holistically. As the learning signal from text is sparse, the visual learning is inefficient and adaptation requires millions of samples to post-pretrain. In this work, we ask: is it possible to efficiently adapt CLIP for general and holistic video understanding? We use videos labeled with structured and dense Semantic Role Labels (SRLs) that capture actions, people or objects, their attributes, adverbs (manner), and location in a structured format representing the entire video in a holistic way. We generate rule-based captions from SRLs and demonstrate that simple contrastive finetuning on a mere 23k video-caption pairs is adequate to learn powerful, transferable representations applicable across a diverse range of video understanding tasks that require varying levels of perceptual granularity. Our adapted CLIP model, SRL-CLIP, exhibits comparable or superior performance on zero-shot text-to-video retrieval compared to state-of-the-art models that possess 4-8x more parameters and are post-pretrained on up to 6000x more data. SRL-CLIP surpasses CLIP on multiple video benchmarks, underscoring the efficient learning and improved representations.

Recent algebraic analysis shows that in decoder-only and encoder-only transformers, the Query projection $W_Q$ may be set to identity without noticeable performance deterioration. This is possible because attention depends on $X$ only through the products $XW_Q, XW_K, XW_V$, allowing basis transformations to be absorbed by adjacent layers and propagated through the network. We replace $W_Q \in \R^{d \times d}$ with a nonlinear residual of the form $Q(X) = X + f_θ(X)$, where $f_θ$ is a bottleneck MLP with $d^2 + O(d)$ parameters. The identity term anchors the nonlinearity to a known-good prior. Experiments on GPT-3 small style models show consistent improvement over the baseline ($2.40\%$ lower validation log-loss, $6.81\%$ lower perplexity), comfortably outperforming a model with 12.5\% more non-embedding parameters. These results motivate investigation at larger scales and across modalities.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a mechanistic interpretability technique that have been used to provide insight into learned concepts within large protein language models. Here, we employ TopK and Ordered SAEs to investigate autoregressive antibody language models, and steer their generation. We show that TopK SAEs can reveal biologically meaningful latent features, but high feature-concept correlation does not guarantee causal control over generation. In contrast, Ordered SAEs impose a hierarchical structure that reliably identifies steerable features, but at the expense of more complex and less interpretable activation patterns. These findings advance the mechanistic interpretability of domain-specific protein language models and suggest that, while TopK SAEs suffice for mapping latent features to concepts, Ordered SAEs are preferable when precise generative steering is required.

Reasoning in large language models is often discussed as a single capability, but some of its gains may stem from simpler underlying operations. We examine two such primitives, recall and state-tracking, through five controlled task families centered on state-based recall, and compare matched transformer and hybrid architectures with and without reasoning augmentation. Across the suite, reasoning-augmented variants substantially outperform instruction-only variants, often by large margins. This pattern is consistent with the State over Tokens view: externalized reasoning traces help because they carry the intermediate state forward in token space. By contrast, hybrid inductive bias does not yield a uniform advantage in accuracy once reasoning tokens are available. When architectural differences do appear, they follow task structure: the hybrid Think model is more robust on strictly sequential chained updates, whereas the transformer Think model is more robust on flat multi-hop retrieval. We therefore cast the main contribution of this study as a descriptive account of what drives performance on state-based recall tasks: reasoning-token augmentation appears to be the dominant factor, while hybrid advantages are narrower, task-dependent, and potentially more about inference efficiency than overall capability. We also release the codebase and data required to reproduce these results.

Training embodied agents to understand 3D scenes as humans do requires large-scale data of people meaningfully interacting with diverse environments, yet such data is scarce. Real-world capture is costly and limited to controlled settings, while existing synthetic datasets rely on simple geometric heuristics, ignoring rich scene context. In contrast, 2D foundation models trained at internet scale have acquired commonsense knowledge of human-environment interactions. To transfer this knowledge to 3D, we introduce InHabit, an automatic and scalable data generator for populating 3D scenes with interacting humans. InHabit follows a render-generate-lift principle: given a rendered 3D scene, a vision-language model proposes contextually meaningful actions, an image-editing model inserts a human, and an optimization procedure lifts the edited result into physically plausible SMPL-X bodies aligned with the scene geometry. Applied to Habitat-Matterport3D, InHabit produces InHabitants, the first large-scale photorealistic 3D human-scene interaction dataset, with 78K samples across $\sim$800 building-scale scenes with complete 3D geometry, SMPL-X bodies, and images. Augmenting standard training data with InHabitants improves RGB-based 3D human-scene reconstruction and contact estimation, and in a perceptual user study our data is preferred in 78% of cases over prior art.

At present, executable visual workflows have emerged as a mainstream paradigm in real-world industrial deployments, offering strong reliability and controllability. However, in current practice, such workflows are almost entirely constructed through manual engineering: developers must carefully design workflows, write prompts for each step, and repeatedly revise the logic as requirements evolve -- making development costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. To study whether large language models can automate this multi-round interaction process, we introduce Chat2Workflow, a benchmark for generating executable visual workflows directly from natural language, and propose a robust agentic baseline to improve performance. The benchmark is built from a large collection of real-world business workflows, with each instance designed so that the generated workflow can be transformed and directly deployed to practical workflow platforms such as Dify and Coze. Experimental results show that while state-of-the-art language models can often capture high-level intent, they struggle to generate correct, stable, and executable workflows, especially given complex and evolving requirements. Although our agentic baseline yields up to 6.05% resolve rate gains, the remaining real-world gap positions Chat2Workflow as a foundation for advancing industrial-grade automation. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/Chat2Workflow.

Nonlinear machine-learning models are increasingly used to discover causal relationships in time-series data, yet the interpretation of their outputs remains poorly understood. In particular, causal scores produced by regularized neural autoregressive models are often treated as analogues of regression coefficients, leading to misleading claims of statistical significance. In this paper, we argue that causal relevance in nonlinear time-series models should be evaluated through forecast necessity rather than coefficient magnitude, and we present a practical evaluation procedure for doing so. We present an interpretable evaluation framework based on systematic edge ablation and forecast comparison, which tests whether a candidate causal relationship is required for accurate prediction. Using Neural Additive Vector Autoregression as a case study model, we apply this framework to a real-world case study of democratic development, modeled as a multivariate time series of panel data - democracy indicators across 139 countries. We show that relationships with similar causal scores can differ dramatically in their predictive necessity due to redundancy, temporal persistence, and regime-specific effects. Our results demonstrate how forecast-necessity testing supports more reliable causal reasoning in applied AI systems and provides practical guidance for interpreting nonlinear time-series models in high-stakes domains.

This paper presents a class of epistemic logics that captures the dynamics of acquiring knowledge and descending into oblivion, while incorporating concepts of group knowledge. The approach is grounded in a system of weighted models, introducing an ``epistemic skills'' metric to represent the epistemic capacities tied to knowledge updates. Within this framework, knowledge acquisition is modeled as a process of upskilling, whereas oblivion is represented as a consequence of downskilling. The framework further enables exploration of ``knowability'' and ``forgettability,'' defined as the potential to gain knowledge through upskilling and to lapse into oblivion through downskilling, respectively. Additionally, it supports a detailed analysis of the distinctions between epistemic de re and de dicto expressions. The computational complexity of the model checking and satisfiability problems is examined, offering insights into their theoretical foundations and practical implications.

Prefilling computational costs pose a significant bottleneck for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in long-context settings. While token pruning reduces sequence length, prior methods rely on heuristics that break compatibility with hardware-efficient kernels like FlashAttention. In this work, we observe that tokens evolve toward \textit{semantic fixing points}, making further processing redundant. To this end, we introduce Delta Attention Selective Halting (DASH), a training-free policy that monitors the layer-wise update dynamics of the self-attention mechanism to selectively halt stabilized tokens. Extensive evaluation confirms that DASH generalizes across language and vision benchmarks, delivering significant prefill speedups while preserving model accuracy and hardware efficiency. Code will be released at https://github.com/verach3n/DASH.git.

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising. In commonly adopted parallel decoding schemes, each step confirms only high-confidence positions while remasking the others. By analyzing dLLM denoising traces, we uncover a key inefficiency: models often predict the correct target token several steps before its confidence becomes high enough to be decoded. This gap between early prediction and late decoding forces repeated remasking of already-correct tokens, causing redundant iterations and limiting acceleration. To exploit this temporal redundancy, we introduce Trace Credit to quantify a token's decoding potential by accumulating historical evidence. Building on this, we propose CreditDecoding, a training-free parallel decoding method that fuses Trace Credit with current logits to boost the confidence of correct but underconfident tokens, thereby accelerating denoising and improving robustness. On eight benchmarks, CreditDecoding achieves up to 5.48 times speedup with +0.48 accuracy on LLaDA-8B and consistently improves performance across diverse dLLM architectures and parameter scales. It further scales to long contexts and remains orthogonal to mainstream inference optimizations, making it a practical and widely applicable solution.

Visual prompted object detection enables interactive and flexible definition of target categories, thereby facilitating open-vocabulary detection. Since visual prompts are derived directly from image features, they often outperform text prompts in recognizing rare categories. Nevertheless, research on visual prompted detection has been largely overlooked, and it is typically treated as a byproduct of training text prompted detectors, which hinders its development. To fully unlock the potential of visual-prompted detection, we investigate the reasons why its performance is suboptimal and reveal that the underlying issue lies in the absence of global discriminability in visual prompts. Motivated by these observations, we propose DETR-ViP, a robust object detection framework that yields class-distinguishable visual prompts. On top of basic image-text contrastive learning, DETR-ViP incorporates global prompt integration and visual-textual prompt relation distillation to learn more discriminative prompt representations. In addition, DETR-ViP employs a selective fusion strategy that ensures stable and robust detection. Extensive experiments on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and Roboflow100 demonstrate that DETR-ViP achieves substantially higher performance in visual prompt detection compared to other state-of-the-art counterparts. A series of ablation studies and analyses further validate the effectiveness of the proposed improvements and shed light on the underlying reasons for the enhanced detection capability of visual prompts.

The proliferation of financial misinformation poses a severe threat to market stability and investor trust, misleading market behavior and creating critical information asymmetry. Detecting such misleading narratives is inherently challenging, particularly in real-world scenarios where external evidence or supplementary references for cross-verification are strictly unavailable. This paper presents our winning methodology for the "Reference-Free Financial Misinformation Detection" shared task. Built upon the recently proposed RFC-BENCH framework (Jiang et al. 2026), this task challenges models to determine the veracity of financial claims by relying solely on internal semantic understanding and contextual consistency, rather than external fact-checking. To address this formidable evaluation setup, we propose a comprehensive framework that capitalizes on the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach systematically integrates in-context learning, specifically zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies, with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to optimally align the models with the subtle linguistic cues of financial manipulation. Our proposed system demonstrated superior efficacy, successfully securing the first-place ranking on both official leaderboards. Specifically, we achieved an accuracy of 95.4% on the public test set and 96.3% on the private test set, highlighting the robustness of our method and contributing to the acceleration of context-aware misinformation detection in financial Natural Language Processing. Our models (14B and 32B) are available at https://huggingface.co/KaiNKaiho.