Daily Papers

Disagreement in natural language annotation has mostly been studied from a perspective of biases introduced by the annotators and the annotation frameworks. Here, we propose to analyze another source of bias: task design bias, which has a particularly strong impact on crowdsourced linguistic annotations where natural language is used to elicit the interpretation of laymen annotators. For this purpose we look at implicit discourse relation annotation, a task that has repeatedly been shown to be difficult due to the relations' ambiguity. We compare the annotations of 1,200 discourse relations obtained using two distinct annotation tasks and quantify the biases of both methods across four different domains. Both methods are natural language annotation tasks designed for crowdsourcing. We show that the task design can push annotators towards certain relations and that some discourse relations senses can be better elicited with one or the other annotation approach. We also conclude that this type of bias should be taken into account when training and testing models.

High-quality instruction-tuning data is critical to improving LLM capabilities. Existing data collection methods are limited by unrealistic manual labeling costs or by the hallucination of relying solely on LLM generation. To address the problems, this paper presents a scalable method to automatically collect high-quality instructional adaptation data by training language models to automatically design tasks based on human-written texts. Intuitively, human-written text helps to help the model attenuate illusions during the generation of tasks. Unlike instruction back-translation-based methods that directly take the given text as a response, we require the model to generate the instruction, input, and output simultaneously to filter the noise. The results of the automated and manual evaluation experiments demonstrate the quality of our dataset.

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in language modeling, its triumph hasn't yet fully translated to visuomotor agents. A primary challenge in RL models is their tendency to overfit specific tasks or environments, thereby hindering the acquisition of generalizable behaviors across diverse settings. This paper provides a preliminary answer to this challenge by demonstrating that RL-finetuned visuomotor agents in Minecraft can achieve zero-shot generalization to unseen worlds. Specifically, we explore RL's potential to enhance generalizable spatial reasoning and interaction capabilities in 3D worlds. To address challenges in multi-task RL representation, we analyze and establish cross-view goal specification as a unified multi-task goal space for visuomotor policies. Furthermore, to overcome the significant bottleneck of manual task design, we propose automated task synthesis within the highly customizable Minecraft environment for large-scale multi-task RL training, and we construct an efficient distributed RL framework to support this. Experimental results show RL significantly boosts interaction success rates by 4times and enables zero-shot generalization of spatial reasoning across diverse environments, including real-world settings. Our findings underscore the immense potential of RL training in 3D simulated environments, especially those amenable to large-scale task generation, for significantly advancing visuomotor agents' spatial reasoning.

In this study, we introduce AmbigNLG, a new task designed to tackle the challenge of task ambiguity in instructions for Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. Despite the impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in understanding and executing a wide range of tasks through natural language interaction, their performance is significantly hindered by the ambiguity present in real-world instructions. To address this, AmbigNLG seeks to identify and mitigate such ambiguities, aiming to refine instructions to match user expectations better. We introduce a dataset, AmbigSNI-NLG, consisting of 2,500 instances, and develop an ambiguity taxonomy for categorizing and annotating instruction ambiguities. Our approach demonstrates substantial improvements in text generation quality, highlighting the critical role of clear and specific instructions in enhancing LLM performance in NLG tasks.

Generalist robot learning remains constrained by data: large-scale, diverse, and high-quality interaction data are expensive to collect in the real world. While simulation has become a promising way for scaling up data collection, the related tasks, including simulation task design, task-aware scene generation, expert demonstration synthesis, and sim-to-real transfer, still demand substantial human effort. We present AnyTask, an automated framework that pairs massively parallel GPU simulation with foundation models to design diverse manipulation tasks and synthesize robot data. We introduce three AnyTask agents for generating expert demonstrations aiming to solve as many tasks as possible: 1) ViPR, a novel task and motion planning agent with VLM-in-the-loop Parallel Refinement; 2) ViPR-Eureka, a reinforcement learning agent with generated dense rewards and LLM-guided contact sampling; 3) ViPR-RL, a hybrid planning and learning approach that jointly produces high-quality demonstrations with only sparse rewards. We train behavior cloning policies on generated data, validate them in simulation, and deploy them directly on real robot hardware. The policies generalize to novel object poses, achieving 44% average success across a suite of real-world pick-and-place, drawer opening, contact-rich pushing, and long-horizon manipulation tasks. Our project website is at https://anytask.rai-inst.com .

We present Legal Argument Reasoning (LAR), a novel task designed to evaluate the legal reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The task requires selecting the correct next statement (from multiple choice options) in a chain of legal arguments from court proceedings, given the facts of the case. We constructed a dataset (LAR-ECHR) for this task using cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). We evaluated seven general-purpose LLMs on LAR-ECHR and found that (a) the ranking of the models is aligned with that of LegalBench, an established US-based legal reasoning benchmark, even though LAR-ECHR is based on EU law, (b) LAR-ECHR distinguishes top models more clearly, compared to LegalBench, (c) even the best model (GPT-4o) obtains 75.8% accuracy on LAR-ECHR, indicating significant potential for further model improvement. The process followed to construct LAR-ECHR can be replicated with cases from other legal systems.

Memes, combining text and images, frequently use metaphors to convey persuasive messages, shaping public opinion. Motivated by this, our team engaged in SemEval-2024 Task 4, a hierarchical multi-label classification task designed to identify rhetorical and psychological persuasion techniques embedded within memes. To tackle this problem, we introduced a caption generation step to assess the modality gap and the impact of additional semantic information from images, which improved our result. Our best model utilizes GPT-4 generated captions alongside meme text to fine-tune RoBERTa as the text encoder and CLIP as the image encoder. It outperforms the baseline by a large margin in all 12 subtasks. In particular, it ranked in top-3 across all languages in Subtask 2a, and top-4 in Subtask 2b, demonstrating quantitatively strong performance. The improvement achieved by the introduced intermediate step is likely attributable to the metaphorical essence of images that challenges visual encoders. This highlights the potential for improving abstract visual semantics encoding.

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently reflect the vast data distributions they encounter during their pre-training phase. As this data is predominantly sourced from the web, there is a high chance it will be skewed towards high-resourced languages and cultures, such as those of the West. Consequently, LLMs often exhibit a diminished understanding of certain communities, a gap that is particularly evident in their knowledge of Arabic and Islamic cultures. This issue becomes even more pronounced with increasingly under-represented topics. To address this critical challenge, we introduce PalmX 2025, the first shared task designed to benchmark the cultural competence of LLMs in these specific domains. The task is composed of two subtasks featuring multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): General Arabic Culture and General Islamic Culture. These subtasks cover a wide range of topics, including traditions, food, history, religious practices, and language expressions from across 22 Arab countries. The initiative drew considerable interest, with 26 teams registering for Subtask 1 and 19 for Subtask 2, culminating in nine and six valid submissions, respectively. Our findings reveal that task-specific fine-tuning substantially boosts performance over baseline models. The top-performing systems achieved an accuracy of 72.15% on cultural questions and 84.22% on Islamic knowledge. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning emerged as the predominant and most effective approach among participants, while the utility of data augmentation was found to be domain-dependent.

Memory Gym presents a suite of 2D partially observable environments, namely Mortar Mayhem, Mystery Path, and Searing Spotlights, designed to benchmark memory capabilities in decision-making agents. These environments, originally with finite tasks, are expanded into innovative, endless formats, mirroring the escalating challenges of cumulative memory games such as ``I packed my bag''. This progression in task design shifts the focus from merely assessing sample efficiency to also probing the levels of memory effectiveness in dynamic, prolonged scenarios. To address the gap in available memory-based Deep Reinforcement Learning baselines, we introduce an implementation that integrates Transformer-XL (TrXL) with Proximal Policy Optimization. This approach utilizes TrXL as a form of episodic memory, employing a sliding window technique. Our comparative study between the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and TrXL reveals varied performances across different settings. TrXL, on the finite environments, demonstrates superior sample efficiency in Mystery Path and outperforms in Mortar Mayhem. However, GRU is more efficient on Searing Spotlights. Most notably, in all endless tasks, GRU makes a remarkable resurgence, consistently outperforming TrXL by significant margins. Website and Source Code: https://github.com/MarcoMeter/endless-memory-gym/

Can a small amount of verified goal information steer the expensive self-supervised pretraining of foundation models? Standard pretraining optimizes a fixed proxy objective (e.g., next-token prediction), which can misallocate compute away from downstream capabilities of interest. We introduce V-Pretraining: a value-based, modality-agnostic method for controlled continued pretraining in which a lightweight task designer reshapes the pretraining task to maximize the value of each gradient step. For example, consider self-supervised learning (SSL) with sample augmentation. The V-Pretraining task designer selects pretraining tasks (e.g., augmentations) for which the pretraining loss gradient is aligned with a gradient computed over a downstream task (e.g., image segmentation). This helps steer pretraining towards relevant downstream capabilities. Notably, the pretrained model is never updated on downstream task labels; they are used only to shape the pretraining task. Under matched learner update budgets, V-Pretraining of 0.5B--7B language models improves reasoning (GSM8K test Pass@1) by up to 18% relative over standard next-token prediction using only 12% of GSM8K training examples as feedback. In vision SSL, we improve the state-of-the-art results on ADE20K by up to 1.07 mIoU and reduce NYUv2 RMSE while improving ImageNet linear accuracy, and we provide pilot evidence of improved token efficiency in continued pretraining.

Transformer-based language models (LMs) track contextual information through large, hard-coded input windows. We introduce MemoryPrompt, a leaner approach in which the LM is complemented by a small auxiliary recurrent network that passes information to the LM by prefixing its regular input with a sequence of vectors, akin to soft prompts, without requiring LM finetuning. Tested on a task designed to probe a LM's ability to keep track of multiple fact updates, a MemoryPrompt-augmented LM outperforms much larger LMs that have access to the full input history. We also test MemoryPrompt on a long-distance dialogue dataset, where its performance is comparable to that of a model conditioned on the entire conversation history. In both experiments we also observe that, unlike full-finetuning approaches, MemoryPrompt does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting when adapted to new tasks, thus not disrupting the generalist capabilities of the underlying LM.

Recent studies have highlighted a phenomenon in large language models (LLMs) known as "the reversal curse," in which the order of knowledge entities in the training data biases the models' comprehension. For example, if a model is trained on sentences where entity A consistently appears before entity B, it can respond to queries about A by providing B as the answer. However, it may encounter confusion when presented with questions concerning B. We contend that the reversal curse is partially a result of specific model training objectives, particularly evident in the prevalent use of the next-token prediction within most causal language models. For the next-token prediction, models solely focus on a token's preceding context, resulting in a restricted comprehension of the input. In contrast, we illustrate that the GLM, trained using the autoregressive blank infilling objective where tokens to be predicted have access to the entire context, exhibits better resilience against the reversal curse. We propose a novel training method, BIdirectional Casual language modeling Optimization (BICO), designed to mitigate the reversal curse when fine-tuning pretrained causal language models on new data. BICO modifies the causal attention mechanism to function bidirectionally and employs a mask denoising optimization. In the task designed to assess the reversal curse, our approach improves Llama's accuracy from the original 0% to around 70%. We hope that more attention can be focused on exploring and addressing these inherent weaknesses of the current LLMs, in order to achieve a higher level of intelligence.

High-throughput screening techniques are commonly used to obtain large quantities of data in many fields of biology. It is well known that artifacts arising from variability in the technical execution of different experimental batches within such screens confound these observations and can lead to invalid biological conclusions. It is therefore necessary to account for these batch effects when analyzing outcomes. In this paper we describe RxRx1, a biological dataset designed specifically for the systematic study of batch effect correction methods. The dataset consists of 125,510 high-resolution fluorescence microscopy images of human cells under 1,138 genetic perturbations in 51 experimental batches across 4 cell types. Visual inspection of the images alone clearly demonstrates significant batch effects. We propose a classification task designed to evaluate the effectiveness of experimental batch correction methods on these images and examine the performance of a number of correction methods on this task. Our goal in releasing RxRx1 is to encourage the development of effective experimental batch correction methods that generalize well to unseen experimental batches. The dataset can be downloaded at https://rxrx.ai.

While Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are rapidly advancing towards generalist robot policies, it remains difficult to quantitatively understand their limits and failure modes. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark called VLA-Arena. We propose a novel structured task design framework to quantify difficulty across three orthogonal axes: (1) Task Structure, (2) Language Command, and (3) Visual Observation. This allows us to systematically design tasks with fine-grained difficulty levels, enabling a precise measurement of model capability frontiers. For Task Structure, VLA-Arena's 170 tasks are grouped into four dimensions: Safety, Distractor, Extrapolation, and Long Horizon. Each task is designed with three difficulty levels (L0-L2), with fine-tuning performed exclusively on L0 to assess general capability. Orthogonal to this, language (W0-W4) and visual (V0-V4) perturbations can be applied to any task to enable a decoupled analysis of robustness. Our extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLAs reveals several critical limitations, including a strong tendency toward memorization over generalization, asymmetric robustness, a lack of consideration for safety constraints, and an inability to compose learned skills for long-horizon tasks. To foster research addressing these challenges and ensure reproducibility, we provide the complete VLA-Arena framework, including an end-to-end toolchain from task definition to automated evaluation and the VLA-Arena-S/M/L datasets for fine-tuning. Our benchmark, data, models, and leaderboard are available at https://vla-arena.github.io.

The rapid evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has brought substantial advancements in artificial intelligence, significantly enhancing the capability to understand and generate multimodal content. While prior studies have largely concentrated on model architectures and training methodologies, a thorough analysis of the benchmarks used for evaluating these models remains underexplored. This survey addresses this gap by systematically reviewing 211 benchmarks that assess MLLMs across four core domains: understanding, reasoning, generation, and application. We provide a detailed analysis of task designs, evaluation metrics, and dataset constructions, across diverse modalities. We hope that this survey will contribute to the ongoing advancement of MLLM research by offering a comprehensive overview of benchmarking practices and identifying promising directions for future work. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers is available.

Multimodal AI agents are increasingly automating complex real-world workflows that involve online web execution. However, current web-agent benchmarks suffer from a critical limitation: they focus entirely on web-based interaction and perception, lacking grounding in the user's real-world physical surroundings. This limitation prevents evaluation in crucial scenarios, such as when an agent must use egocentric visual perception (e.g., via AR glasses) to recognize an object in the user's surroundings and then complete a related task online. To address this gap, we introduce Ego2Web, the first benchmark designed to bridge egocentric video perception and web agent execution. Ego2Web pairs real-world first-person video recordings with web tasks that require visual understanding, web task planning, and interaction in an online environment for successful completion. We utilize an automatic data-generation pipeline combined with human verification and refinement to curate well-constructed, high-quality video-task pairs across diverse web task types, including e-commerce, media retrieval, knowledge lookup, etc. To facilitate accurate and scalable evaluation for our benchmark, we also develop a novel LLM-as-a-Judge automatic evaluation method, Ego2WebJudge, which achieves approximately 84% agreement with human judgment, substantially higher than existing evaluation methods. Experiments with diverse SoTA agents on our Ego2Web show that their performance is weak, with substantial headroom across all task categories. We also conduct a comprehensive ablation study on task design, highlighting the necessity of accurate video understanding in the proposed task and the limitations of current agents. We hope Ego2Web can be a critical new resource for developing truly capable AI assistants that can seamlessly see, understand, and act across the physical and digital worlds.

While Language Models (LMs) have made significant progress in automating machine learning engineering (MLE), the acquisition of high-quality MLE training data is significantly constrained. Current MLE benchmarks suffer from low scalability and limited applicability because they rely on static, manually curated tasks, demanding extensive time and manual effort to produce. We introduce MLE-Smith, a fully automated multi-agent pipeline, to transform raw datasets into competition-style MLE challenges through an efficient generate-verify-execute paradigm for scaling MLE tasks with verifiable quality, real-world usability, and rich diversity. The proposed multi-agent pipeline in MLE-Smith drives structured task design and standardized refactoring, coupled with a hybrid verification mechanism that enforces strict structural rules and high-level semantic soundness. It further validates empirical solvability and real-world fidelity through interactive execution. We apply MLE-Smith to 224 of real-world datasets and generate 606 tasks spanning multiple categories, objectives, and modalities, demonstrating that MLE-Smith can work effectively across a wide range of real-world datasets. Evaluation on the generated tasks shows that the performance of eight mainstream and cutting-edge LLMs on MLE-Smith tasks is strongly correlated with their performance on carefully human-designed tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of the MLE-Smith to scaling up MLE tasks, while maintaining task quality.

Recently, with the rapid development of robot learning and imitation learning, numerous datasets and methods have emerged. However, these datasets and their task designs often lack systematic consideration and principles. This raises important questions: Do the current datasets and task designs truly advance the capabilities of robotic agents? Do evaluations on a few common tasks accurately reflect the differentiated performance of various methods proposed by different teams and evaluated on different tasks? To address these issues, we introduce the Great March 100 (GM-100) as the first step towards a robot learning Olympics. GM-100 consists of 100 carefully designed tasks that cover a wide range of interactions and long-tail behaviors, aiming to provide a diverse and challenging set of tasks to comprehensively evaluate the capabilities of robotic agents and promote diversity and complexity in robot dataset task designs. These tasks are developed through systematic analysis and expansion of existing task designs, combined with insights from human-object interaction primitives and object affordances. We collect a large amount of trajectory data on different robotic platforms and evaluate several baseline models. Experimental results demonstrate that the GM-100 tasks are 1) feasible to execute and 2) sufficiently challenging to effectively differentiate the performance of current VLA models. Our data and code are available at https://rhos.ai/research/gm-100.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has demonstrated capabilities across various domains, but comprehensive benchmarks for agricultural remote sensing (RS) remain scarce. Existing benchmarks designed for agricultural RS scenarios exhibit notable limitations, primarily in terms of insufficient scene diversity in the dataset and oversimplified task design. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgroMind, a comprehensive agricultural remote sensing benchmark covering four task dimensions: spatial perception, object understanding, scene understanding, and scene reasoning, with a total of 13 task types, ranging from crop identification and health monitoring to environmental analysis. We curate a high-quality evaluation set by integrating eight public datasets and one private farmland plot dataset, containing 25,026 QA pairs and 15,556 images. The pipeline begins with multi-source data preprocessing, including collection, format standardization, and annotation refinement. We then generate a diverse set of agriculturally relevant questions through the systematic definition of tasks. Finally, we employ LMMs for inference, generating responses, and performing detailed examinations. We evaluated 18 open-source LMMs and 3 closed-source models on AgroMind. Experiments reveal significant performance gaps, particularly in spatial reasoning and fine-grained recognition, it is notable that human performance lags behind several leading LMMs. By establishing a standardized evaluation framework for agricultural RS, AgroMind reveals the limitations of LMMs in domain knowledge and highlights critical challenges for future work. Data and code can be accessed at https://rssysu.github.io/AgroMind/.

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) is a pivotal task designed to extract named entities from text with the support of pertinent images. Nonetheless, a notable paucity of data for Chinese MNER has considerably impeded the progress of this natural language processing task within the Chinese domain. Consequently, in this study, we compile a Chinese Multimodal NER dataset (CMNER) utilizing data sourced from Weibo, China's largest social media platform. Our dataset encompasses 5,000 Weibo posts paired with 18,326 corresponding images. The entities are classified into four distinct categories: person, location, organization, and miscellaneous. We perform baseline experiments on CMNER, and the outcomes underscore the effectiveness of incorporating images for NER. Furthermore, we conduct cross-lingual experiments on the publicly available English MNER dataset (Twitter2015), and the results substantiate our hypothesis that Chinese and English multimodal NER data can mutually enhance the performance of the NER model.

In standard neural networks the amount of computation used grows with the size of the inputs, but not with the complexity of the problem being learnt. To overcome this limitation we introduce PonderNet, a new algorithm that learns to adapt the amount of computation based on the complexity of the problem at hand. PonderNet learns end-to-end the number of computational steps to achieve an effective compromise between training prediction accuracy, computational cost and generalization. On a complex synthetic problem, PonderNet dramatically improves performance over previous adaptive computation methods and additionally succeeds at extrapolation tests where traditional neural networks fail. Also, our method matched the current state of the art results on a real world question and answering dataset, but using less compute. Finally, PonderNet reached state of the art results on a complex task designed to test the reasoning capabilities of neural networks.1

DeepMind Lab is a first-person 3D game platform designed for research and development of general artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. DeepMind Lab can be used to study how autonomous artificial agents may learn complex tasks in large, partially observed, and visually diverse worlds. DeepMind Lab has a simple and flexible API enabling creative task-designs and novel AI-designs to be explored and quickly iterated upon. It is powered by a fast and widely recognised game engine, and tailored for effective use by the research community.

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) is an emerging frontier in robotics, driven by the need for autonomous systems that can perceive, reason, and act in complex physical environments. While single-arm systems have shown strong task performance, collaborative dual-arm systems are essential for handling more intricate tasks involving rigid, deformable, and tactile-sensitive objects. To advance this goal, we launched the RoboTwin Dual-Arm Collaboration Challenge at the 2nd MEIS Workshop, CVPR 2025. Built on the RoboTwin Simulation platform (1.0 and 2.0) and the AgileX COBOT-Magic Robot platform, the competition consisted of three stages: Simulation Round 1, Simulation Round 2, and a final Real-World Round. Participants totally tackled 17 dual-arm manipulation tasks, covering rigid, deformable, and tactile-based scenarios. The challenge attracted 64 global teams and over 400 participants, producing top-performing solutions like SEM and AnchorDP3 and generating valuable insights into generalizable bimanual policy learning. This report outlines the competition setup, task design, evaluation methodology, key findings and future direction, aiming to support future research on robust and generalizable bimanual manipulation policies. The Challenge Webpage is available at https://robotwin-benchmark.github.io/cvpr-2025-challenge/.

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, yet it remains a major challenge for contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). Prior work largely relied on synthetic or LLM-generated environments with limited task designs and puzzle-like setups, failing to capture the real-world complexity, visual noise, and diverse spatial relationships that VLMs encounter. To address this, we introduce SpatiaLab, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs' spatial reasoning in realistic, unconstrained contexts. SpatiaLab comprises 1,400 visual question-answer pairs across six major categories: Relative Positioning, Depth & Occlusion, Orientation, Size & Scale, Spatial Navigation, and 3D Geometry, each with five subcategories, yielding 30 distinct task types. Each subcategory contains at least 25 questions, and each main category includes at least 200 questions, supporting both multiple-choice and open-ended evaluation. Experiments across diverse state-of-the-art VLMs, including open- and closed-source models, reasoning-focused, and specialized spatial reasoning models, reveal a substantial gap in spatial reasoning capabilities compared with humans. In the multiple-choice setup, InternVL3.5-72B achieves 54.93% accuracy versus 87.57% for humans. In the open-ended setting, all models show a performance drop of around 10-25%, with GPT-5-mini scoring highest at 40.93% versus 64.93% for humans. These results highlight key limitations in handling complex spatial relationships, depth perception, navigation, and 3D geometry. By providing a diverse, real-world evaluation framework, SpatiaLab exposes critical challenges and opportunities for advancing VLMs' spatial reasoning, offering a benchmark to guide future research toward robust, human-aligned spatial understanding. SpatiaLab is available at: https://spatialab-reasoning.github.io/.

We present Text-to-OverpassQL, a task designed to facilitate a natural language interface for querying geodata from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The Overpass Query Language (OverpassQL) allows users to formulate complex database queries and is widely adopted in the OSM ecosystem. Generating Overpass queries from natural language input serves multiple use-cases. It enables novice users to utilize OverpassQL without prior knowledge, assists experienced users with crafting advanced queries, and enables tool-augmented large language models to access information stored in the OSM database. In order to assess the performance of current sequence generation models on this task, we propose OverpassNL, a dataset of 8,352 queries with corresponding natural language inputs. We further introduce task specific evaluation metrics and ground the evaluation of the Text-to-OverpassQL task by executing the queries against the OSM database. We establish strong baselines by finetuning sequence-to-sequence models and adapting large language models with in-context examples. The detailed evaluation reveals strengths and weaknesses of the considered learning strategies, laying the foundations for further research into the Text-to-OverpassQL task.

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

This paper proposes Omni Dense Captioning, a novel task designed to generate continuous, fine-grained, and structured audio-visual narratives with explicit timestamps. To ensure dense semantic coverage, we introduce a six-dimensional structural schema to create "script-like" captions, enabling readers to vividly imagine the video content scene by scene, akin to a cinematographic screenplay. To facilitate research, we construct OmniDCBench, a high-quality, human-annotated benchmark, and propose SodaM, a unified metric that evaluates time-aware detailed descriptions while mitigating scene boundary ambiguity. Furthermore, we construct a training dataset, TimeChatCap-42K, and present TimeChat-Captioner-7B, a strong baseline trained via SFT and GRPO with task-specific rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeChat-Captioner-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro, while its generated dense descriptions significantly boost downstream capabilities in audio-visual reasoning (DailyOmni and WorldSense) and temporal grounding (Charades-STA). All datasets, models, and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yaolinli/TimeChat-Captioner.

We introduce self-invoking code generation, a new task designed to evaluate the progressive reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. In this task, models are presented with a base problem and a related, more complex problem. They must solve the base problem and then utilize its solution to address the more complex one. This work features three key contributions. First, we propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks, resulting in three new benchmarks: HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BigCodeBench-Lite Pro, specifically designed to assess LLMs on self-invoking code generation. Second, from the analysis of experimental results over twenty LLMs on our benchmarks, we have two important observations: (i) Most LLMs excel in traditional code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP, but their performance declines on self-invoking tasks. For example, o1-mini achieves 96.2% pass@1 on HumanEval but only 76.2% on HumanEval Pro. (ii) On self-invoking code generation task, the instruction-tuned models demonstrate only marginal improvements compared to the base models. Third, we disclose the types of failure modes that exist in our evaluation results. All these results underscore the need for further advancements in self-invoking code generation tasks and provide a new direction for future research on enhancing LLMs' code reasoning capabilities.

Achieving human-like spatial intelligence for vision-language models (VLMs) requires inferring 3D structures from 2D observations, recognizing object properties and relations in 3D space, and performing high-level spatial reasoning. In this paper, we propose a principled hierarchical framework that decomposes the learning of 3D spatial understanding in VLMs into four progressively complex levels, from geometric perception to abstract spatial reasoning. Guided by this framework, we construct an automated pipeline that processes approximately 5M images with over 45M objects to generate 3D spatial VQA pairs across diverse tasks and scenes for VLM supervised fine-tuning. We also develop an RGB-D VLM incorporating metric-scale point maps as auxiliary inputs to further enhance spatial understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple spatial understanding and reasoning benchmarks, surpassing specialized spatial models and large proprietary systems such as Gemini-2.5-pro and GPT-5. Moreover, our analysis reveals clear dependencies among hierarchical task levels, offering new insights into how multi-level task design facilitates the emergence of 3D spatial intelligence.

Prompt tuning, which involves training a small set of parameters, effectively enhances the pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. However, they often come at the cost of flexibility and adaptability when the tuned models are applied to different datasets or domains. In this paper, we explore capturing the task-specific information via meticulous refinement of entire VLMs, with minimal parameter adjustments. When fine-tuning the entire VLMs for specific tasks under limited supervision, overfitting and catastrophic forgetting become the defacto factors. To mitigate these issues, we propose a framework named CLIP-CITE via designing a discriminative visual-text task, further aligning the visual-text semantics in a supervision manner, and integrating knowledge distillation techniques to preserve the gained knowledge. Extensive experimental results under few-shot learning, base-to-new generalization, domain generalization, and cross-domain generalization settings, demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the performance on specific tasks under limited supervision while preserving the versatility of the VLMs on other datasets.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved 2D visual understanding, prompting interest in their application to complex 3D reasoning tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these models can effectively capture the detailed spatial information required for robust real-world performance, especially cross-view consistency, a key requirement for accurate 3D reasoning. Considering this issue, we introduce Viewpoint Learning, a task designed to evaluate and improve the spatial reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. We present the Viewpoint-100K dataset, consisting of 100K object-centric image pairs with diverse viewpoints and corresponding question-answer pairs. Our approach employs a two-stage fine-tuning strategy: first, foundational knowledge is injected to the baseline MLLM via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on Viewpoint-100K, resulting in significant improvements across multiple tasks; second, generalization is enhanced through Reinforcement Learning using the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm on a broader set of questions. Additionally, we introduce a hybrid cold-start initialization method designed to simultaneously learn viewpoint representations and maintain coherent reasoning thinking. Experimental results show that our approach significantly activates the spatial reasoning ability of MLLM, improving performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Our findings highlight the value of developing foundational spatial skills in MLLMs, supporting future progress in robotics, autonomous systems, and 3D scene understanding.

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but remain coarse-grained, exhibit visual biases, and miss subtle visual details. Existing training corpora reinforce this limitation by emphasizing general recognition ("Is it a cat or a dog?") over fine-grained perception. To address this, we introduce a new training corpus and task designed to enhance the perceptual abilities of VLMs. TWIN is a large-scale dataset of 561,000 image-pair queries that task models to determine whether two visually similar images depict the same object, encouraging attention to nuanced visual cues. The dataset spans a diverse range of everyday objects across contexts, viewpoints, and appearances. Fine-tuning VLMs on TWIN yields notable gains in fine-grained recognition, even on unseen domains such as art, animals, plants, and landmarks. To quantify these gains, we introduce FGVQA, a benchmark suite of 12,000 queries that repurposes fine-grained recognition and retrieval datasets from multiple domains. While existing VLMs struggle on FGVQA, when fine-tuned on TWIN they improve by up to 19.3%, without compromising performance on general VQA benchmarks. Finally, our TWIN dataset scales favorably with object annotations, and our analysis shows that scale is key to performance. We envision TWIN as a drop-in addition to open-source VLM training corpora, advancing perceptual precision of future models. Project webpage: https://glab-caltech.github.io/twin/

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a central paradigm for training foundation models by leveraging large-scale unlabeled datasets, often producing representations with strong generalization capabilities. These models are typically pre-trained on general-purpose datasets such as ImageNet and subsequently adapted to various downstream tasks through finetuning. While recent advances have explored parameter-efficient strategies for adapting pre-trained models, extending SSL pre-training itself to new domains - particularly under limited data regimes and for dense prediction tasks - remains underexplored. In this work, we address the problem of adapting vision foundation models to new domains in an unsupervised and data-efficient manner, specifically targeting downstream semantic segmentation. We propose GLARE (Global Local and Regional Enforcement), a novel continual self-supervised pre-training task designed to enhance downstream segmentation performance. GLARE introduces patch-level augmentations to encourage local consistency and incorporates a regional consistency constraint that leverages spatial semantics in the data. For efficient continual pre-training, we initialize Vision Transformers (ViTs) with weights from existing SSL models and update only lightweight adapter modules - specifically UniAdapter - while keeping the rest of the backbone frozen. Experiments across multiple semantic segmentation benchmarks on different domains demonstrate that GLARE consistently improves downstream performance with minimal computational and parameter overhead.

As it is empirically observed that Vision Transformers (ViTs) are quite insensitive to the order of input tokens, the need for an appropriate self-supervised pretext task that enhances the location awareness of ViTs is becoming evident. To address this, we present DropPos, a novel pretext task designed to reconstruct Dropped Positions. The formulation of DropPos is simple: we first drop a large random subset of positional embeddings and then the model classifies the actual position for each non-overlapping patch among all possible positions solely based on their visual appearance. To avoid trivial solutions, we increase the difficulty of this task by keeping only a subset of patches visible. Additionally, considering there may be different patches with similar visual appearances, we propose position smoothing and attentive reconstruction strategies to relax this classification problem, since it is not necessary to reconstruct their exact positions in these cases. Empirical evaluations of DropPos show strong capabilities. DropPos outperforms supervised pre-training and achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art self-supervised alternatives on a wide range of downstream benchmarks. This suggests that explicitly encouraging spatial reasoning abilities, as DropPos does, indeed contributes to the improved location awareness of ViTs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Haochen-Wang409/DropPos.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread adoption of AI-powered coding assistants integrated into a development environment. On one hand, low-latency code completion offers completion suggestions but is fundamentally constrained to the cursor's current position. On the other hand, chat-based editing can perform complex modifications, yet forces developers to stop their work, describe the intent in natural language, which causes a context-switch away from the code. This creates a suboptimal user experience, as neither paradigm proactively predicts the developer's next edit in a sequence of related edits. To bridge this gap and provide the seamless code edit suggestion, we introduce the task of Next Edit Prediction, a novel task designed to infer developer intent from recent interaction history to predict both the location and content of the subsequent edit. Specifically, we curate a high-quality supervised fine-tuning dataset and an evaluation benchmark for the Next Edit Prediction task. Then, we conduct supervised fine-tuning on a series of models and performed a comprehensive evaluation of both the fine-tuned models and other baseline models, yielding several novel findings. This work lays the foundation for a new interaction paradigm that proactively collaborate with developers by anticipating their following action, rather than merely reacting to explicit instructions.

Engineering construction automation aims to transform natural language specifications into physically viable structures, requiring complex integrated reasoning under strict physical constraints. While modern LLMs possess broad knowledge and strong reasoning capabilities that make them promising candidates for this domain, their construction competencies remain largely unevaluated. To address this gap, we introduce BuildArena, the first physics-aligned interactive benchmark designed for language-driven engineering construction. It contributes to the community in four aspects: (1) a highly customizable benchmarking framework for in-depth comparison and analysis of LLMs; (2) an extendable task design strategy spanning static and dynamic mechanics across multiple difficulty tiers; (3) a 3D Spatial Geometric Computation Library for supporting construction based on language instructions; (4) a baseline LLM agentic workflow that effectively evaluates diverse model capabilities. On eight frontier LLMs, BuildArena comprehensively evaluates their capabilities for language-driven and physics-grounded construction automation. The project page is at https://build-arena.github.io/.

Model Inversion (MI) attacks aim to reconstruct information from private training data by exploiting access to machine learning models T. To evaluate such attacks, the standard evaluation framework relies on an evaluation model E, trained under the same task design as T. This framework has become the de facto standard for assessing progress in MI research, used across nearly all recent MI studies without question. In this paper, we present the first in-depth study of this evaluation framework. In particular, we identify a critical issue of this standard framework: Type-I adversarial examples. These are reconstructions that do not capture the visual features of private training data, yet are still deemed successful by T and ultimately transferable to E. Such false positives undermine the reliability of the standard MI evaluation framework. To address this issue, we introduce a new MI evaluation framework that replaces the evaluation model E with advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). By leveraging their general-purpose visual understanding, our MLLM-based framework does not depend on training of shared task design as in T, thus reducing Type-I transferability and providing more faithful assessments of reconstruction success. Using our MLLM-based evaluation framework, we reevaluate 27 diverse MI attack setups and empirically reveal consistently high false positive rates under the standard evaluation framework. Importantly, we demonstrate that many state-of-the-art (SOTA) MI methods report inflated attack accuracy, indicating that actual privacy leakage is significantly lower than previously believed. By uncovering this critical issue and proposing a robust solution, our work enables a reassessment of progress in MI research and sets a new standard for reliable and robust evaluation. Code can be found in https://github.com/hosytuyen/MI-Eval-MLLM

The NLC2CMD Competition hosted at NeurIPS 2020 aimed to bring the power of natural language processing to the command line. Participants were tasked with building models that can transform descriptions of command line tasks in English to their Bash syntax. This is a report on the competition with details of the task, metrics, data, attempted solutions, and lessons learned.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced video understanding capabilities, opening new possibilities for practical applications. Yet current video benchmarks focus largely on indoor scenes or short-range outdoor activities, leaving the challenges associated with long-distance travel largely unexplored. Mastering extended geospatial-temporal trajectories is critical for next-generation MLLMs, underpinning real-world tasks such as embodied-AI planning and navigation. To bridge this gap, we present VIR-Bench, a novel benchmark consisting of 200 travel videos that frames itinerary reconstruction as a challenging task designed to evaluate and push forward MLLMs' geospatial-temporal intelligence. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art MLLMs, including proprietary ones, struggle to achieve high scores, underscoring the difficulty of handling videos that span extended spatial and temporal scales. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth case study in which we develop a prototype travel-planning agent that leverages the insights gained from VIR-Bench. The agent's markedly improved itinerary recommendations verify that our evaluation protocol not only benchmarks models effectively but also translates into concrete performance gains in user-facing applications.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong perception and reasoning performance on existing remote sensing (RS) benchmarks. However, most prior benchmarks rely on low-resolution imagery, and some high-resolution benchmarks suffer from flawed reasoning-task designs. We show that text-only LLMs can perform competitively with multimodal vision-language models on RS reasoning tasks without access to images, revealing a critical mismatch between current benchmarks and the intended evaluation of visual understanding. To enable faithful assessment, we introduce RSHR-Bench, a super-high-resolution benchmark for RS visual understanding and reasoning. RSHR-Bench contains 5,329 full-scene images with a long side of at least 4,000 pixels, with up to about 3 x 10^8 pixels per image, sourced from widely used RS corpora and UAV collections. We design four task families: multiple-choice VQA, open-ended VQA, image captioning, and single-image evaluation. These tasks cover nine perception categories and four reasoning types, supporting multi-turn and multi-image dialog. To reduce reliance on language priors, we apply adversarial filtering with strong LLMs followed by rigorous human verification. Overall, we construct 3,864 VQA tasks, 3,913 image captioning tasks, and 500 fully human-written or verified single-image evaluation VQA pairs. Evaluations across open-source, closed-source, and RS-specific VLMs reveal persistent performance gaps in super-high-resolution scenarios. Code: https://github.com/Yunkaidang/RSHR

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand the mental states of oneself and others, remains a challenging area for large language models (LLMs), which often fail to predict human mental states accurately. In this paper, we introduce UniToMBench, a unified benchmark that integrates the strengths of SimToM and TOMBENCH to systematically improve and assess ToM capabilities in LLMs by integrating multi-interaction task designs and evolving story scenarios. Supported by a custom dataset of over 1,000 hand-written scenarios, UniToMBench combines perspective-taking techniques with diverse evaluation metrics to better stimulate social cognition in LLMs. Through evaluation, we observe that while models like GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini show consistently high accuracy in tasks involving emotional and belief-related scenarios, with results usually above 80%, there is significant variability in their performance across knowledge-based tasks. These results highlight both the strengths and limitations of current LLMs in ToM-related tasks, underscoring the value of UniToMBench as a comprehensive tool for future development. Our code is publicly available here: https://github.com/Shamant/unifiedtombenchmark.

Current methods for disaster scene interpretation in remote sensing images (RSIs) mostly focus on isolated tasks such as segmentation, detection, or visual question-answering (VQA). However, current interpretation methods often fail at tasks that require the combination of multiple perception methods and specialized tools. To fill this gap, this paper introduces Adaptive Disaster Interpretation (ADI), a novel task designed to solve requests by planning and executing multiple sequentially correlative interpretation tasks to provide a comprehensive analysis of disaster scenes. To facilitate research and application in this area, we present a new dataset named RescueADI, which contains high-resolution RSIs with annotations for three connected aspects: planning, perception, and recognition. The dataset includes 4,044 RSIs, 16,949 semantic masks, 14,483 object bounding boxes, and 13,424 interpretation requests across nine challenging request types. Moreover, we propose a new disaster interpretation method employing autonomous agents driven by large language models (LLMs) for task planning and execution, proving its efficacy in handling complex disaster interpretations. The proposed agent-based method solves various complex interpretation requests such as counting, area calculation, and path-finding without human intervention, which traditional single-task approaches cannot handle effectively. Experimental results on RescueADI demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed task and show that our method achieves an accuracy 9% higher than existing VQA methods, highlighting its advantages over conventional disaster interpretation approaches. The dataset will be publicly available.

Masked Autoencoder (MAE) has demonstrated superior performance on various vision tasks via randomly masking image patches and reconstruction. However, effective data augmentation strategies for MAE still remain open questions, different from those in contrastive learning that serve as the most important part. This paper studies the prevailing mixing augmentation for MAE. We first demonstrate that naive mixing will in contrast degenerate model performance due to the increase of mutual information (MI). To address, we propose homologous recognition, an auxiliary pretext task, not only to alleviate the MI increasement by explicitly requiring each patch to recognize homologous patches, but also to perform object-aware self-supervised pre-training for better downstream dense perception performance. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed Mixed Autoencoder (MixedAE) achieves the state-of-the-art transfer results among masked image modeling (MIM) augmentations on different downstream tasks with significant efficiency. Specifically, our MixedAE outperforms MAE by +0.3% accuracy, +1.7 mIoU and +0.9 AP on ImageNet-1K, ADE20K and COCO respectively with a standard ViT-Base. Moreover, MixedAE surpasses iBOT, a strong MIM method combined with instance discrimination, while accelerating training by 2x. To our best knowledge, this is the very first work to consider mixing for MIM from the perspective of pretext task design. Code will be made available.

We present the COGnitive Neural GENerative system (CogNGen), a cognitive architecture that combines two neurobiologically-plausible, computational models: predictive processing and hyperdimensional/vector-symbolic models. We draw inspiration from architectures such as ACT-R and Spaun/Nengo. CogNGen is in broad agreement with these, providing a level of detail between ACT-R's high-level symbolic description of human cognition and Spaun's low-level neurobiological description, furthermore creating the groundwork for designing agents that learn continually from diverse tasks and model human performance at larger scales than what is possible with current systems. We test CogNGen on four maze-learning tasks, including those that test memory and planning, and find that CogNGen matches performance of deep reinforcement learning models and exceeds on a task designed to test memory.

Driver distraction has become a significant cause of severe traffic accidents over the past decade. Despite the growing development of vision-driven driver monitoring systems, the lack of comprehensive perception datasets restricts road safety and traffic security. In this paper, we present an AssIstive Driving pErception dataset (AIDE) that considers context information both inside and outside the vehicle in naturalistic scenarios. AIDE facilitates holistic driver monitoring through three distinctive characteristics, including multi-view settings of driver and scene, multi-modal annotations of face, body, posture, and gesture, and four pragmatic task designs for driving understanding. To thoroughly explore AIDE, we provide experimental benchmarks on three kinds of baseline frameworks via extensive methods. Moreover, two fusion strategies are introduced to give new insights into learning effective multi-stream/modal representations. We also systematically investigate the importance and rationality of the key components in AIDE and benchmarks. The project link is https://github.com/ydk122024/AIDE.

We present a Japanese domain-specific language model for the pharmaceutical field, developed through continual pretraining on 2 billion Japanese pharmaceutical tokens and 8 billion English biomedical tokens. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce three new benchmarks: YakugakuQA, based on national pharmacist licensing exams; NayoseQA, which tests cross-lingual synonym and terminology normalization; and SogoCheck, a novel task designed to assess consistency reasoning between paired statements. We evaluate our model against both open-source medical LLMs and commercial models, including GPT-4o. Results show that our domain-specific model outperforms existing open models and achieves competitive performance with commercial ones, particularly on terminology-heavy and knowledge-based tasks. Interestingly, even GPT-4o performs poorly on SogoCheck, suggesting that cross-sentence consistency reasoning remains an open challenge. Our benchmark suite offers a broader diagnostic lens for pharmaceutical NLP, covering factual recall, lexical variation, and logical consistency. This work demonstrates the feasibility of building practical, secure, and cost-effective language models for Japanese domain-specific applications, and provides reusable evaluation resources for future research in pharmaceutical and healthcare NLP. Our model, codes, and datasets are released at https://github.com/EQUES-Inc/pharma-LLM-eval.

Layer-wise distillation is a powerful tool to compress large models (i.e. teacher models) into small ones (i.e., student models). The student distills knowledge from the teacher by mimicking the hidden representations of the teacher at every intermediate layer. However, layer-wise distillation is difficult. Since the student has a smaller model capacity than the teacher, it is often under-fitted. Furthermore, the hidden representations of the teacher contain redundant information that the student does not necessarily need for the target task's learning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Task-aware layEr-wise Distillation (TED). TED designs task-aware filters to align the hidden representations of the student and the teacher at each layer. The filters select the knowledge that is useful for the target task from the hidden representations. As such, TED reduces the knowledge gap between the two models and helps the student to fit better on the target task. We evaluate TED in two scenarios: continual pre-training and fine-tuning. TED demonstrates significant and consistent improvements over existing distillation methods in both scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/cliang1453/task-aware-distillation.

Evaluations of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods are an integral part of scientific progress of the field. Beyond designing DRL methods for general intelligence, designing task-specific methods is becoming increasingly prominent for real-world applications. In these settings, the standard evaluation practice involves using a few instances of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to represent the task. However, many tasks induce a large family of MDPs owing to variations in the underlying environment, particularly in real-world contexts. For example, in traffic signal control, variations may stem from intersection geometries and traffic flow levels. The select MDP instances may thus inadvertently cause overfitting, lacking the statistical power to draw conclusions about the method's true performance across the family. In this article, we augment DRL evaluations to consider parameterized families of MDPs. We show that in comparison to evaluating DRL methods on select MDP instances, evaluating the MDP family often yields a substantially different relative ranking of methods, casting doubt on what methods should be considered state-of-the-art. We validate this phenomenon in standard control benchmarks and the real-world application of traffic signal control. At the same time, we show that accurately evaluating on an MDP family is nontrivial. Overall, this work identifies new challenges for empirical rigor in reinforcement learning, especially as the outcomes of DRL trickle into downstream decision-making.

This paper introduces WirelessGPT, a pioneering foundation model specifically designed for multi-task learning in wireless communication and sensing. Specifically, WirelessGPT leverages large-scale wireless channel datasets for unsupervised pretraining and extracting universal channel representations, which captures complex spatiotemporal dependencies. In fact,this task-agnostic design adapts WirelessGPT seamlessly to a wide range of downstream tasks, using a unified representation with minimal fine-tuning. By unifying communication and sensing functionalities, WirelessGPT addresses the limitations of task-specific models, offering a scalable and efficient solution for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). With an initial parameter size of around 80 million, WirelessGPT demonstrates significant improvements over conventional methods and smaller AI models, reducing reliance on large-scale labeled data. As the first foundation model capable of supporting diverse tasks across different domains, WirelessGPT establishes a new benchmark, paving the way for future advancements in multi-task wireless systems.

Inverse design, where we seek to design input variables in order to optimize an underlying objective function, is an important problem that arises across fields such as mechanical engineering to aerospace engineering. Inverse design is typically formulated as an optimization problem, with recent works leveraging optimization across learned dynamics models. However, as models are optimized they tend to fall into adversarial modes, preventing effective sampling. We illustrate that by instead optimizing over the learned energy function captured by the diffusion model, we can avoid such adversarial examples and significantly improve design performance. We further illustrate how such a design system is compositional, enabling us to combine multiple different diffusion models representing subcomponents of our desired system to design systems with every specified component. In an N-body interaction task and a challenging 2D multi-airfoil design task, we demonstrate that by composing the learned diffusion model at test time, our method allows us to design initial states and boundary shapes that are more complex than those in the training data. Our method generalizes to more objects for N-body dataset and discovers formation flying to minimize drag in the multi-airfoil design task. Project website and code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/cindm.

Image-based fashion design with AI techniques has attracted increasing attention in recent years. We focus on a new fashion design task, where we aim to transfer a reference appearance image onto a clothing image while preserving the structure of the clothing image. It is a challenging task since there are no reference images available for the newly designed output fashion images. Although diffusion-based image translation or neural style transfer (NST) has enabled flexible style transfer, it is often difficult to maintain the original structure of the image realistically during the reverse diffusion, especially when the referenced appearance image greatly differs from the common clothing appearance. To tackle this issue, we present a novel diffusion model-based unsupervised structure-aware transfer method to semantically generate new clothes from a given clothing image and a reference appearance image. In specific, we decouple the foreground clothing with automatically generated semantic masks by conditioned labels. And the mask is further used as guidance in the denoising process to preserve the structure information. Moreover, we use the pre-trained vision Transformer (ViT) for both appearance and structure guidance. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models, generating more realistic images in the fashion design task. Code and demo can be found at https://github.com/Rem105-210/DiffFashion.

Architectural design is a highly complex practice that involves a wide diversity of disciplines, technologies, proprietary design software, expertise, and an almost infinite number of constraints, across a vast array of design tasks. Enabling intuitive, accessible, and scalable design processes is an important step towards performance-driven and sustainable design for all. To that end, we introduce Architext, a novel semantic generation assistive tool. Architext enables design generation with only natural language prompts, given to large-scale Language Models, as input. We conduct a thorough quantitative evaluation of Architext's downstream task performance, focusing on semantic accuracy and diversity for a number of pre-trained language models ranging from 120 million to 6 billion parameters. Architext models are able to learn the specific design task, generating valid residential layouts at a near 100% rate. Accuracy shows great improvement when scaling the models, with the largest model (GPT-J) yielding impressive accuracy ranging between 25% to over 80% for different prompt categories. We open source the finetuned Architext models and our synthetic dataset, hoping to inspire experimentation in this exciting area of design research.

Generative AI has made rapid advancements in recent years, achieving unprecedented capabilities in multimodal understanding and code generation. This can enable a new paradigm of front-end development, in which multimodal LLMs might directly convert visual designs into code implementations. In this work, we formalize this as a Design2Code task and conduct comprehensive benchmarking. Specifically, we manually curate a benchmark of 484 diverse real-world webpages as test cases and develop a set of automatic evaluation metrics to assess how well current multimodal LLMs can generate the code implementations that directly render into the given reference webpages, given the screenshots as input. We also complement automatic metrics with comprehensive human evaluations. We develop a suite of multimodal prompting methods and show their effectiveness on GPT-4V and Gemini Pro Vision. We further finetune an open-source Design2Code-18B model that successfully matches the performance of Gemini Pro Vision. Both human evaluation and automatic metrics show that GPT-4V performs the best on this task compared to other models. Moreover, annotators think GPT-4V generated webpages can replace the original reference webpages in 49% of cases in terms of visual appearance and content; and perhaps surprisingly, in 64% of cases GPT-4V generated webpages are considered better than the original reference webpages. Our fine-grained break-down metrics indicate that open-source models mostly lag in recalling visual elements from the input webpages and in generating correct layout designs, while aspects like text content and coloring can be drastically improved with proper finetuning.

Recent advancements in large language model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated that collective intelligence can significantly surpass the capabilities of individual agents, primarily due to well-crafted inter-agent communication topologies. Despite the diverse and high-performing designs available, practitioners often face confusion when selecting the most effective pipeline for their specific task: Which topology is the best choice for my task, avoiding unnecessary communication token overhead while ensuring high-quality solution? In response to this dilemma, we introduce G-Designer, an adaptive, efficient, and robust solution for multi-agent deployment, which dynamically designs task-aware, customized communication topologies. Specifically, G-Designer models the multi-agent system as a multi-agent network, leveraging a variational graph auto-encoder to encode both the nodes (agents) and a task-specific virtual node, and decodes a task-adaptive and high-performing communication topology. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks showcase that G-Designer is: (1) high-performing, achieving superior results on MMLU with accuracy at 84.50% and on HumanEval with pass@1 at 89.90%; (2) task-adaptive, architecting communication protocols tailored to task difficulty, reducing token consumption by up to 95.33% on HumanEval; and (3) adversarially robust, defending against agent adversarial attacks with merely 0.3% accuracy drop.

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

Recently, AI-generated images (AIGIs) created by given prompts (initial prompts) have garnered widespread attention. Nevertheless, due to technical nonproficiency, they often suffer from poor perception quality and Text-to-Image misalignment. Therefore, assessing the perception quality and alignment quality of AIGIs is crucial to improving the generative model's performance. Existing assessment methods overly rely on the initial prompts in the task prompt design and use the same prompts to guide both perceptual and alignment quality evaluation, overlooking the distinctions between the two tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a novel quality assessment method for AIGIs named TSP-MGS, which designs task-specific prompts and measures multi-granularity similarity between AIGIs and the prompts. Specifically, task-specific prompts are first constructed to describe perception and alignment quality degrees separately, and the initial prompt is introduced for detailed quality perception. Then, the coarse-grained similarity between AIGIs and task-specific prompts is calculated, which facilitates holistic quality awareness. In addition, to improve the understanding of AIGI details, the fine-grained similarity between the image and the initial prompt is measured. Finally, precise quality prediction is acquired by integrating the multi-granularity similarities. Experiments on the commonly used AGIQA-1K and AGIQA-3K benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TSP-MGS.

Existing open-source datasets for arbitrary-instruction image editing remain suboptimal, while a plug-and-play editing module compatible with community-prevalent generative models is notably absent. In this paper, we first introduce the X2Edit Dataset, a comprehensive dataset covering 14 diverse editing tasks, including subject-driven generation. We utilize the industry-leading unified image generation models and expert models to construct the data. Meanwhile, we design reasonable editing instructions with the VLM and implement various scoring mechanisms to filter the data. As a result, we construct 3.7 million high-quality data with balanced categories. Second, to better integrate seamlessly with community image generation models, we design task-aware MoE-LoRA training based on FLUX.1, with only 8\% of the parameters of the full model. To further improve the final performance, we utilize the internal representations of the diffusion model and define positive/negative samples based on image editing types to introduce contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the model's editing performance is competitive among many excellent models. Additionally, the constructed dataset exhibits substantial advantages over existing open-source datasets. The open-source code, checkpoints, and datasets for X2Edit can be found at the following link: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/X2Edit.

High precision, lightweight, and real-time responsiveness are three essential requirements for implementing autonomous driving. In this study, we incorporate A-YOLOM, an adaptive, real-time, and lightweight multi-task model designed to concurrently address object detection, drivable area segmentation, and lane line segmentation tasks. Specifically, we develop an end-to-end multi-task model with a unified and streamlined segmentation structure. We introduce a learnable parameter that adaptively concatenates features between necks and backbone in segmentation tasks, using the same loss function for all segmentation tasks. This eliminates the need for customizations and enhances the model's generalization capabilities. We also introduce a segmentation head composed only of a series of convolutional layers, which reduces the number of parameters and inference time. We achieve competitive results on the BDD100k dataset, particularly in visualization outcomes. The performance results show a mAP50 of 81.1% for object detection, a mIoU of 91.0% for drivable area segmentation, and an IoU of 28.8% for lane line segmentation. Additionally, we introduce real-world scenarios to evaluate our model's performance in a real scene, which significantly outperforms competitors. This demonstrates that our model not only exhibits competitive performance but is also more flexible and faster than existing multi-task models. The source codes and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/JiayuanWang-JW/YOLOv8-multi-task

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of new benchmarks for evaluating their performance in the financial domain. However, current financial benchmarks often rely on news articles, earnings reports, or announcements, making it challenging to capture the real-world dynamics of financial meetings. To address this gap, we propose a novel benchmark called M^3FinMeeting, which is a multilingual, multi-sector, and multi-task dataset designed for financial meeting understanding. First, M^3FinMeeting supports English, Chinese, and Japanese, enhancing comprehension of financial discussions in diverse linguistic contexts. Second, it encompasses various industry sectors defined by the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), ensuring that the benchmark spans a broad range of financial activities. Finally, M^3FinMeeting includes three tasks: summarization, question-answer (QA) pair extraction, and question answering, facilitating a more realistic and comprehensive evaluation of understanding. Experimental results with seven popular LLMs reveal that even the most advanced long-context models have significant room for improvement, demonstrating the effectiveness of M^3FinMeeting as a benchmark for assessing LLMs' financial meeting comprehension skills.

We propose a simple, efficient, yet powerful framework for dense visual predictions based on the conditional diffusion pipeline. Our approach follows a "noise-to-map" generative paradigm for prediction by progressively removing noise from a random Gaussian distribution, guided by the image. The method, called DDP, efficiently extends the denoising diffusion process into the modern perception pipeline. Without task-specific design and architecture customization, DDP is easy to generalize to most dense prediction tasks, e.g., semantic segmentation and depth estimation. In addition, DDP shows attractive properties such as dynamic inference and uncertainty awareness, in contrast to previous single-step discriminative methods. We show top results on three representative tasks with six diverse benchmarks, without tricks, DDP achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on each task compared to the specialist counterparts. For example, semantic segmentation (83.9 mIoU on Cityscapes), BEV map segmentation (70.6 mIoU on nuScenes), and depth estimation (0.05 REL on KITTI). We hope that our approach will serve as a solid baseline and facilitate future research

Current language models (LMs) excel at reasoning over prompts using pre-trained knowledge. However, real-world tasks are far more complex and context-dependent: models must learn from task-specific context and leverage new knowledge beyond what is learned during pre-training to reason and resolve tasks. We term this capability context learning, a crucial ability that humans naturally possess but has been largely overlooked. To this end, we introduce CL-bench, a real-world benchmark consisting of 500 complex contexts, 1,899 tasks, and 31,607 verification rubrics, all crafted by experienced domain experts. Each task is designed such that the new content required to resolve it is contained within the corresponding context. Resolving tasks in CL-bench requires models to learn from the context, ranging from new domain-specific knowledge, rule systems, and complex procedures to laws derived from empirical data, all of which are absent from pre-training. This goes far beyond long-context tasks that primarily test retrieval or reading comprehension, and in-context learning tasks, where models learn simple task patterns via instructions and demonstrations. Our evaluations of ten frontier LMs find that models solve only 17.2% of tasks on average. Even the best-performing model, GPT-5.1, solves only 23.7%, revealing that LMs have yet to achieve effective context learning, which poses a critical bottleneck for tackling real-world, complex context-dependent tasks. CL-bench represents a step towards building LMs with this fundamental capability, making them more intelligent and advancing their deployment in real-world scenarios.

Although perception systems have made remarkable advancements in recent years, they still rely on explicit human instruction to identify the target objects or categories before executing visual recognition tasks. Such systems lack the ability to actively reason and comprehend implicit user intentions. In this work, we propose a new segmentation task -- reasoning segmentation. The task is designed to output a segmentation mask given a complex and implicit query text. Furthermore, we establish a benchmark comprising over one thousand image-instruction pairs, incorporating intricate reasoning and world knowledge for evaluation purposes. Finally, we present LISA: large Language Instructed Segmentation Assistant, which inherits the language generation capabilities of the multi-modal Large Language Model (LLM) while also possessing the ability to produce segmentation masks. We expand the original vocabulary with a <SEG> token and propose the embedding-as-mask paradigm to unlock the segmentation capability. Remarkably, LISA can handle cases involving: 1) complex reasoning; 2) world knowledge; 3) explanatory answers; 4) multi-turn conversation. Also, it demonstrates robust zero-shot capability when trained exclusively on reasoning-free datasets. In addition, fine-tuning the model with merely 239 reasoning segmentation image-instruction pairs results in further performance enhancement. Experiments show our method not only unlocks new reasoning segmentation capabilities but also proves effective in both complex reasoning segmentation and standard referring segmentation tasks. Code, models, and demo are at https://github.com/dvlab-research/LISA.

3D Affordance detection is a challenging problem with broad applications on various robotic tasks. Existing methods typically formulate the detection paradigm as a label-based semantic segmentation task. This paradigm relies on predefined labels and lacks the ability to comprehend complex natural language, resulting in limited generalization in open-world scene. To address these limitations, we reformulate the traditional affordance detection paradigm into Instruction Reasoning Affordance Segmentation (IRAS) task. This task is designed to output a affordance mask region given a query reasoning text, which avoids fixed categories of input labels. We accordingly propose the 3D-AffordanceLLM (3D-ADLLM), a framework designed for reasoning affordance detection in 3D open-scene. Specifically, 3D-ADLLM introduces large language models (LLMs) to 3D affordance perception with a custom-designed decoder for generating affordance masks, thus achieving open-world reasoning affordance detection. In addition, given the scarcity of 3D affordance datasets for training large models, we seek to extract knowledge from general segmentation data and transfer it to affordance detection. Thus, we propose a multi-stage training strategy that begins with a novel pre-training task, i.e., Referring Object Part Segmentation~(ROPS). This stage is designed to equip the model with general recognition and segmentation capabilities at the object-part level. Then followed by fine-tuning with the IRAS task, 3D-ADLLM obtains the reasoning ability for affordance detection. In summary, 3D-ADLLM leverages the rich world knowledge and human-object interaction reasoning ability of LLMs, achieving approximately an 8\% improvement in mIoU on open-vocabulary affordance detection tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, with GPT models at the forefront. While their remarkable performance spans a range of tasks, adapting LLMs for real-world business scenarios still poses challenges warranting further investigation. This paper presents an empirical analysis aimed at bridging the gap in adapting LLMs to practical use cases. To do that, we select the question answering (QA) task of insurance as a case study due to its challenge of reasoning. Based on the task we design a new model relied on LLMs which are empowered by additional knowledge extracted from insurance policy rulebooks and DBpedia. The additional knowledge helps LLMs to understand new concepts of insurance for domain adaptation. Preliminary results on two QA datasets show that knowledge enhancement significantly improves the reasoning ability of GPT-3.5 (55.80% and 57.83% in terms of accuracy). The analysis also indicates that existing public knowledge bases, e.g., DBPedia is beneficial for knowledge enhancement. Our findings reveal that the inherent complexity of business scenarios often necessitates the incorporation of domain-specific knowledge and external resources for effective problem-solving.

Inverse molecular design with diffusion models holds great potential for advancements in material and drug discovery. Despite success in unconditional molecular generation, integrating multiple properties such as synthetic score and gas permeability as condition constraints into diffusion models remains unexplored. We present the Graph Diffusion Transformer (Graph DiT) for multi-conditional molecular generation. Graph DiT integrates an encoder to learn numerical and categorical property representations with the Transformer-based denoiser. Unlike previous graph diffusion models that add noise separately on the atoms and bonds in the forward diffusion process, Graph DiT is trained with a novel graph-dependent noise model for accurate estimation of graph-related noise in molecules. We extensively validate Graph DiT for multi-conditional polymer and small molecule generation. Results demonstrate the superiority of Graph DiT across nine metrics from distribution learning to condition control for molecular properties. A polymer inverse design task for gas separation with feedback from domain experts further demonstrates its practical utility.

The advancement of large language model (LLM) based agents has shifted AI evaluation from single-turn response assessment to multi-step task completion in interactive environments. We present an empirical study evaluating frontier AI models on 150 workplace tasks within a realistic e-commerce RL environment from Surge. Our analysis reveals an empirically-derived hierarchy of agentic capabilities that models must master for real-world deployment: (1) tool use, (2) planning and goal formation, (3) adaptability, (4) groundedness, and (5) common-sense reasoning. Even the best-performing models fail approximately 40\% of the tasks, with failures clustering predictably along this hierarchy. Weaker models struggle with fundamental tool use and planning, whereas stronger models primarily fail on tasks requiring contextual inference beyond explicit instructions. We introduce a task-centric design methodology for RL environments that emphasizes diversity and domain expert contributions, provide detailed failure analysis, and discuss implications for agent development. Our findings suggest that while current frontier models can demonstrate coherent multi-step behavior, substantial capability gaps remain before achieving human-level task completion in realistic workplace settings.

Text-based 3D human motion editing is a critical yet challenging task in computer vision and graphics. While training-free approaches have been explored, the recent release of the MotionFix dataset, which includes source-text-motion triplets, has opened new avenues for training, yielding promising results. However, existing methods struggle with precise control, often leading to misalignment between motion semantics and language instructions. In this paper, we introduce a related task, motion similarity prediction, and propose a multi-task training paradigm, where we train the model jointly on motion editing and motion similarity prediction to foster the learning of semantically meaningful representations. To complement this task, we design an advanced Diffusion-Transformer-based architecture that separately handles motion similarity prediction and motion editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach in both editing alignment and fidelity.

Multi-modality image fusion, particularly infrared and visible, plays a crucial role in integrating diverse modalities to enhance scene understanding. Although early research prioritized visual quality, preserving fine details and adapting to downstream tasks remains challenging. Recent approaches attempt task-specific design but rarely achieve "The Best of Both Worlds" due to inconsistent optimization goals. To address these issues, we propose a novel method that leverages the semantic knowledge from the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to Grow the quality of fusion results and Enable downstream task adaptability, namely SAGE. Specifically, we design a Semantic Persistent Attention (SPA) Module that efficiently maintains source information via the persistent repository while extracting high-level semantic priors from SAM. More importantly, to eliminate the impractical dependence on SAM during inference, we introduce a bi-level optimization-driven distillation mechanism with triplet losses, which allow the student network to effectively extract knowledge. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves a balance between high-quality visual results and downstream task adaptability while maintaining practical deployment efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/RollingPlain/SAGE_IVIF.

Tables contain factual and quantitative data accompanied by various structures and contents that pose challenges for machine comprehension. Previous methods generally design task-specific architectures and objectives for individual tasks, resulting in modal isolation and intricate workflows. In this paper, we present a novel large vision-language model, TabPedia, equipped with a concept synergy mechanism. In this mechanism, all the involved diverse visual table understanding (VTU) tasks and multi-source visual embeddings are abstracted as concepts. This unified framework allows TabPedia to seamlessly integrate VTU tasks, such as table detection, table structure recognition, table querying, and table question answering, by leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Moreover, the concept synergy mechanism enables table perception-related and comprehension-related tasks to work in harmony, as they can effectively leverage the needed clues from the corresponding source perception embeddings. Furthermore, to better evaluate the VTU task in real-world scenarios, we establish a new and comprehensive table VQA benchmark, ComTQA, featuring approximately 9,000 QA pairs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on both table perception and comprehension tasks, conducted across various public benchmarks, validate the effectiveness of our TabPedia. The superior performance further confirms the feasibility of using LLMs for understanding visual tables when all concepts work in synergy. The benchmark ComTQA has been open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ByteDance/ComTQA. The source code and model will be released later.

In health, most large language model (LLM) research has focused on clinical tasks. However, mobile and wearable devices, which are rarely integrated into such tasks, provide rich, longitudinal data for personal health monitoring. Here we present Personal Health Large Language Model (PH-LLM), fine-tuned from Gemini for understanding and reasoning over numerical time-series personal health data. We created and curated three datasets that test 1) production of personalized insights and recommendations from sleep patterns, physical activity, and physiological responses, 2) expert domain knowledge, and 3) prediction of self-reported sleep outcomes. For the first task we designed 857 case studies in collaboration with domain experts to assess real-world scenarios in sleep and fitness. Through comprehensive evaluation of domain-specific rubrics, we observed that Gemini Ultra 1.0 and PH-LLM are not statistically different from expert performance in fitness and, while experts remain superior for sleep, fine-tuning PH-LLM provided significant improvements in using relevant domain knowledge and personalizing information for sleep insights. We evaluated PH-LLM domain knowledge using multiple choice sleep medicine and fitness examinations. PH-LLM achieved 79% on sleep and 88% on fitness, exceeding average scores from a sample of human experts. Finally, we trained PH-LLM to predict self-reported sleep quality outcomes from textual and multimodal encoding representations of wearable data, and demonstrate that multimodal encoding is required to match performance of specialized discriminative models. Although further development and evaluation are necessary in the safety-critical personal health domain, these results demonstrate both the broad knowledge and capabilities of Gemini models and the benefit of contextualizing physiological data for personal health applications as done with PH-LLM.

An important task for designing QA systems is answer sentence selection (AS2): selecting the sentence containing (or constituting) the answer to a question from a set of retrieved relevant documents. In this paper, we propose three novel sentence-level transformer pre-training objectives that incorporate paragraph-level semantics within and across documents, to improve the performance of transformers for AS2, and mitigate the requirement of large labeled datasets. Specifically, the model is tasked to predict whether: (i) two sentences are extracted from the same paragraph, (ii) a given sentence is extracted from a given paragraph, and (iii) two paragraphs are extracted from the same document. Our experiments on three public and one industrial AS2 datasets demonstrate the empirical superiority of our pre-trained transformers over baseline models such as RoBERTa and ELECTRA for AS2.

There has been unprecedented interest in developing agents that expand the boundary of scientific discovery, primarily by optimizing quantitative objective functions specified by scientists. However, for grand challenges in science, these objectives may only be imperfect proxies. We argue that automating objective function design is a central, yet unmet need for scientific discovery agents. In this work, we introduce the Scientific Autonomous Goal-evolving Agent (SAGA) to address this challenge. SAGA employs a bi-level architecture in which an outer loop of LLM agents analyzes optimization outcomes, proposes new objectives, and converts them into computable scoring functions, while an inner loop performs solution optimization under the current objectives. This bi-level design enables systematic exploration of the space of objectives and their trade-offs, rather than treating them as fixed inputs. We demonstrate the framework through a wide range of design applications, including antibiotics, nanobodies, functional DNA sequences, inorganic materials, and chemical processes. Notably, our experimental validation identifies a structurally novel hit with promising potency and safety profiles for E. coli in the antibiotic design task, and three de novo PD-L1 binders in the nanobody design task. These results suggest that automating objective formulation can substantially improve the effectiveness of scientific discovery agents.

Portfolio optimization has been a broad and intense area of interest for quantitative and statistical finance researchers and financial analysts. It is a challenging task to design a portfolio of stocks to arrive at the optimized values of the return and risk. This paper presents an algorithmic approach for designing optimum risk and eigen portfolios for five thematic sectors of the NSE of India. The prices of the stocks are extracted from the web from Jan 1, 2016, to Dec 31, 2020. Optimum risk and eigen portfolios for each sector are designed based on ten critical stocks from the sector. An LSTM model is designed for predicting future stock prices. Seven months after the portfolios were formed, on Aug 3, 2021, the actual returns of the portfolios are compared with the LSTM-predicted returns. The predicted and the actual returns indicate a very high-level accuracy of the LSTM model.

Foreground segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision, encompassing various subdivision tasks. Previous research has typically designed task-specific architectures for each task, leading to a lack of unification. Moreover, they primarily focus on recognizing foreground objects without effectively distinguishing them from the background. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of the background and its relationship with the foreground. We introduce FOCUS, the Foreground ObjeCts Universal Segmentation framework that can handle multiple foreground tasks. We develop a multi-scale semantic network using the edge information of objects to enhance image features. To achieve boundary-aware segmentation, we propose a novel distillation method, integrating the contrastive learning strategy to refine the prediction mask in multi-modal feature space. We conduct extensive experiments on a total of 13 datasets across 5 tasks, and the results demonstrate that FOCUS consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art task-specific models on most metrics.

We present RiO-DETR: DETR for Real-time Oriented Object Detection, the first real-time oriented detection transformer to the best of our knowledge. Adapting DETR to oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) poses three challenges: semantics-dependent orientation, angle periodicity that breaks standard Euclidean refinement, and an enlarged search space that slows convergence. RiO-DETR resolves these issues with task-native designs while preserving real-time efficiency. First, we propose Content-Driven Angle Estimation by decoupling angle from positional queries, together with Rotation-Rectified Orthogonal Attention to capture complementary cues for reliable orientation. Second, Decoupled Periodic Refinement combines bounded coarse-to-fine updates with a Shortest-Path Periodic Loss for stable learning across angular seams. Third, Oriented Dense O2O injects angular diversity into dense supervision to speed up angle convergence at no extra cost. Extensive experiments on DOTA-1.0, DIOR-R, and FAIR-1M-2.0 demonstrate RiO-DETR establishes a new speed--accuracy trade-off for real-time oriented detection. Code will be made publicly available.

Function calling enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external systems by leveraging tools and APIs. When faced with multi-step tool usage, LLMs still struggle with tool selection, parameter generation, and tool-chain planning. Existing methods typically rely on manually designing task-specific demonstrations, or retrieving from a curated library. These approaches demand substantial expert effort and prompt engineering becomes increasingly complex and inefficient as tool diversity and task difficulty scale. To address these challenges, we propose a self-guided method, Stepwise Experience Recall (SEER), which performs fine-grained, stepwise retrieval from a continually updated experience pool. Instead of relying on static or manually curated library, SEER incrementally augments the experience pool with past successful trajectories, enabling continuous expansion of the pool and improved model performance over time. Evaluated on the ToolQA benchmark, SEER achieves an average improvement of 6.1% on easy and 4.7% on hard questions. We further test SEER on τ-bench, which includes two real-world domains. Powered by Qwen2.5-7B and Qwen2.5-72B models, SEER demonstrates substantial accuracy gains of 7.44% and 23.38%, respectively.

The scene graph generation (SGG) task is designed to identify the predicates based on the subject-object pairs.However,existing datasets generally include two imbalance cases: one is the class imbalance from the predicted predicates and another is the context imbalance from the given subject-object pairs, which presents significant challenges for SGG. Most existing methods focus on the imbalance of the predicted predicate while ignoring the imbalance of the subject-object pairs, which could not achieve satisfactory results. To address the two imbalance cases, we propose a novel Environment Invariant Curriculum Relation learning (EICR) method, which can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion to existing SGG methods. Concretely, to remove the imbalance of the subject-object pairs, we first construct different distribution environments for the subject-object pairs and learn a model invariant to the environment changes. Then, we construct a class-balanced curriculum learning strategy to balance the different environments to remove the predicate imbalance. Comprehensive experiments conducted on VG and GQA datasets demonstrate that our EICR framework can be taken as a general strategy for various SGG models, and achieve significant improvements.

Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks (RSNNs) have emerged as a computationally efficient and brain-inspired learning model. The design of sparse RSNNs with fewer neurons and synapses helps reduce the computational complexity of RSNNs. Traditionally, sparse SNNs are obtained by first training a dense and complex SNN for a target task, and, then, pruning neurons with low activity (activity-based pruning) while maintaining task performance. In contrast, this paper presents a task-agnostic methodology for designing sparse RSNNs by pruning a large randomly initialized model. We introduce a novel Lyapunov Noise Pruning (LNP) algorithm that uses graph sparsification methods and utilizes Lyapunov exponents to design a stable sparse RSNN from a randomly initialized RSNN. We show that the LNP can leverage diversity in neuronal timescales to design a sparse Heterogeneous RSNN (HRSNN). Further, we show that the same sparse HRSNN model can be trained for different tasks, such as image classification and temporal prediction. We experimentally show that, in spite of being task-agnostic, LNP increases computational efficiency (fewer neurons and synapses) and prediction performance of RSNNs compared to traditional activity-based pruning of trained dense models.

Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) is a critical task for designing effective retrieval-based Question Answering (QA) systems. Most advancements in AS2 focus on English due to the scarcity of annotated datasets for other languages. This lack of resources prevents the training of effective AS2 models in different languages, creating a performance gap between QA systems in English and other locales. In this paper, we introduce new high-quality datasets for AS2 in five European languages (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), obtained through supervised Automatic Machine Translation (AMT) of existing English AS2 datasets such as ASNQ, WikiQA, and TREC-QA using a Large Language Model (LLM). We evaluated our approach and the quality of the translated datasets through multiple experiments with different Transformer architectures. The results indicate that our datasets are pivotal in producing robust and powerful multilingual AS2 models, significantly contributing to closing the performance gap between English and other languages.

Pathology is the study of microscopic inspection of tissue, and a pathology diagnosis is often the medical gold standard to diagnose disease. Pathology images provide a unique challenge for computer-vision-based analysis: a single pathology Whole Slide Image (WSI) is gigapixel-sized and often contains hundreds of thousands to millions of objects of interest across multiple resolutions. In this work, we propose PathoLogy Universal TransfOrmer (PLUTO): a light-weight pathology FM that is pre-trained on a diverse dataset of 195 million image tiles collected from multiple sites and extracts meaningful representations across multiple WSI scales that enable a large variety of downstream pathology tasks. In particular, we design task-specific adaptation heads that utilize PLUTO's output embeddings for tasks which span pathology scales ranging from subcellular to slide-scale, including instance segmentation, tile classification, and slide-level prediction. We compare PLUTO's performance to other state-of-the-art methods on a diverse set of external and internal benchmarks covering multiple biologically relevant tasks, tissue types, resolutions, stains, and scanners. We find that PLUTO matches or outperforms existing task-specific baselines and pathology-specific foundation models, some of which use orders-of-magnitude larger datasets and model sizes when compared to PLUTO. Our findings present a path towards a universal embedding to power pathology image analysis, and motivate further exploration around pathology foundation models in terms of data diversity, architectural improvements, sample efficiency, and practical deployability in real-world applications.

In this paper, we focus on solving one of the most important tasks in the field of speech processing, i.e., automatic speech recognition (ASR), with speech foundation encoders and large language models (LLM). Recent works have complex designs such as compressing the output temporally for the speech encoder, tackling modal alignment for the projector, and utilizing parameter-efficient fine-tuning for the LLM. We found that delicate designs are not necessary, while an embarrassingly simple composition of off-the-shelf speech encoder, LLM, and the only trainable linear projector is competent for the ASR task. To be more specific, we benchmark and explore various combinations of LLMs and speech encoders, leading to the optimal LLM-based ASR system, which we call SLAM-ASR. The proposed SLAM-ASR provides a clean setup and little task-specific design, where only the linear projector is trained. To the best of our knowledge, SLAM-ASR achieves the best performance on the Librispeech benchmark among LLM-based ASR models and even outperforms the latest LLM-based audio-universal model trained on massive pair data. Finally, we explore the capability emergence of LLM-based ASR in the process of modal alignment. We hope that our study can facilitate the research on extending LLM with cross-modality capacity and shed light on the LLM-based ASR community.

Multi-agent systems built on Large Language Models (LLMs) show exceptional promise for complex collaborative problem-solving, yet they face fundamental challenges stemming from context window limitations that impair memory consistency, role adherence, and procedural integrity. This paper introduces Intrinsic Memory Agents, a novel framework that addresses these limitations through agent-specific memories that evolve intrinsically with agent outputs. Specifically, our method maintains role-aligned memory that preserves specialized perspectives while focusing on task-relevant information. Our approach utilises a generic memory template applicable to new problems without the need to hand-craft specific memory prompts. We benchmark our approach on the PDDL, FEVER, and ALFWorld datasets, comparing its performance to existing state-of-the-art multi-agentic memory approaches and showing state-of-the-art or comparable performance across all three, with the highest consistency. An additional evaluation is performed on a complex data pipeline design task, and we demonstrate that our approach produces higher quality designs across 5 metrics: scalability, reliability, usability, cost-effectiveness, and documentation, plus additional qualitative evidence of the improvements. Our findings suggest that addressing memory limitations through intrinsic approaches can improve the capabilities of multi-agent LLM systems on structured planning tasks.

Generalist models have achieved remarkable success in both language and vision-language tasks, showcasing the potential of unified modeling. However, effectively integrating fine-grained perception tasks like detection and segmentation into these models remains a significant challenge. This is primarily because these tasks often rely heavily on task-specific designs and architectures that can complicate the modeling process. To address this challenge, we present \ours, a framework that Unifies Fine-grained visual perception tasks through an Open-ended language interface. By transforming all perception targets into the language space, \ours unifies object-level detection, pixel-level segmentation, and image-level vision-language tasks into a single model. Additionally, we introduce a novel embedding retrieval approach that relies solely on the language interface to support segmentation tasks. Our framework bridges the gap between fine-grained perception and vision-language tasks, significantly simplifying architectural design and training strategies while achieving comparable or superior performance to methods with intricate task-specific designs. After multi-task training on five standard visual perception datasets, \ours outperforms the previous state-of-the-art generalist models by 12.3 mAP on COCO instance segmentation and 3.3 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation. Furthermore, our method seamlessly integrates with existing MLLMs, effectively combining fine-grained perception capabilities with their advanced language abilities, thereby enabling more challenging tasks such as reasoning segmentation. Code and models will be publicly available.

In this work, we introduce FaceXformer, an end-to-end unified transformer model for a comprehensive range of facial analysis tasks such as face parsing, landmark detection, head pose estimation, attributes recognition, and estimation of age, gender, race, and landmarks visibility. Conventional methods in face analysis have often relied on task-specific designs and preprocessing techniques, which limit their approach to a unified architecture. Unlike these conventional methods, our FaceXformer leverages a transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture where each task is treated as a learnable token, enabling the integration of multiple tasks within a single framework. Moreover, we propose a parameter-efficient decoder, FaceX, which jointly processes face and task tokens, thereby learning generalized and robust face representations across different tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a single model capable of handling all these facial analysis tasks using transformers. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of effective backbones for unified face task processing and evaluated different task queries and the synergy between them. We conduct experiments against state-of-the-art specialized models and previous multi-task models in both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations across multiple benchmarks. Additionally, our model effectively handles images "in-the-wild," demonstrating its robustness and generalizability across eight different tasks, all while maintaining the real-time performance of 37 FPS.

Existing methods for vision-and-language learning typically require designing task-specific architectures and objectives for each task. For example, a multi-label answer classifier for visual question answering, a region scorer for referring expression comprehension, and a language decoder for image captioning, etc. To alleviate these hassles, in this work, we propose a unified framework that learns different tasks in a single architecture with the same language modeling objective, i.e., multimodal conditional text generation, where our models learn to generate labels in text based on the visual and textual inputs. On 7 popular vision-and-language benchmarks, including visual question answering, referring expression comprehension, visual commonsense reasoning, most of which have been previously modeled as discriminative tasks, our generative approach (with a single unified architecture) reaches comparable performance to recent task-specific state-of-the-art vision-and-language models. Moreover, our generative approach shows better generalization ability on questions that have rare answers. Also, we show that our framework allows multi-task learning in a single architecture with a single set of parameters, achieving similar performance to separately optimized single-task models. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/j-min/VL-T5

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) supports practitioners and researchers with the tedious task of designing machine learning pipelines and has recently achieved substantial success. In this paper, we introduce new AutoML approaches motivated by our winning submission to the second ChaLearn AutoML challenge. We develop PoSH Auto-sklearn, which enables AutoML systems to work well on large datasets under rigid time limits by using a new, simple and meta-feature-free meta-learning technique and by employing a successful bandit strategy for budget allocation. However, PoSH Auto-sklearn introduces even more ways of running AutoML and might make it harder for users to set it up correctly. Therefore, we also go one step further and study the design space of AutoML itself, proposing a solution towards truly hands-free AutoML. Together, these changes give rise to the next generation of our AutoML system, Auto-sklearn 2.0. We verify the improvements by these additions in an extensive experimental study on 39 AutoML benchmark datasets. We conclude the paper by comparing to other popular AutoML frameworks and Auto-sklearn 1.0, reducing the relative error by up to a factor of 4.5, and yielding a performance in 10 minutes that is substantially better than what Auto-sklearn 1.0 achieves within an hour.

The recent paradigm shift toward large reasoning models (LRMs) as autonomous agents has intensified the demand for sophisticated, multi-turn tool-use capabilities. Yet, existing datasets and data-generation approaches are limited by static, predefined toolsets that cannot scale to the complexity of open-ended human-agent collaboration. To address this, we initially developed a framework for automated task-oriented multi-turn dialogue generation at scale, utilizing an LRM-based simulator to dynamically generate high-value, domain-specific tools to solve specified tasks. However, we observe that a purely task-oriented design often results in "solely task-solving" trajectories, where the agent completes the objective with minimal interaction, failing to generate the high turn-count conversations seen in realistic scenarios. To bridge this gap, we shift toward a user-oriented simulation paradigm. By decoupling task generation from a dedicated user simulator that mimics human behavioral rules - such as incremental request-making and turn-by-turn feedback - we facilitate more authentic, extended multi-turn dialogues that reflect the iterative nature of real-world problem solving. Our generation pipeline operates as a versatile, plug-and-play module capable of initiating generation from any state, ensuring high scalability in producing extended tool-use data. Furthermore, by facilitating multiple task completions within a single trajectory, it yields a high-density dataset that reflects the multifaceted demands of real-world human-agent interaction.

Video tracking aims at finding the specific target in subsequent frames given its initial state. Due to the varying granularity of target states across different tasks, most existing trackers are tailored to a single task and heavily rely on custom-designed modules within the individual task, which limits their generalization and leads to redundancy in both model design and parameters. To unify video tracking tasks, we present SAM 2++, a unified model towards tracking at any granularity, including masks, boxes, and points. First, to extend target granularity, we design task-specific prompts to encode various task inputs into general prompt embeddings, and a unified decoder to unify diverse task results into a unified form pre-output. Next, to satisfy memory matching, the core operation of tracking, we introduce a task-adaptive memory mechanism that unifies memory across different granularities. Finally, we introduce a customized data engine to support tracking training at any granularity, producing a large and diverse video tracking dataset with rich annotations at three granularities, termed Tracking-Any-Granularity, which represents a comprehensive resource for training and benchmarking on unified tracking. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks confirm that SAM 2++ sets a new state of the art across diverse tracking tasks at different granularities, establishing a unified and robust tracking framework.

With the deep integration of artificial intelligence and interactive technology, Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agent, as the carrier connecting goal-oriented natural language and real-world devices, has received widespread attention from the community. Contemporary benchmarks aim to evaluate the comprehensive capabilities of GUI agents in GUI operation tasks, generally determining task completion solely by inspecting the final screen state. However, GUI operation tasks consist of multiple chained steps while not all critical information is presented in the final few pages. Although a few research has begun to incorporate intermediate steps into evaluation, accurately and automatically capturing this process information still remains an open challenge. To address this weakness, we introduce ProBench, a comprehensive mobile benchmark with over 200 challenging GUI tasks covering widely-used scenarios. Remaining the traditional State-related Task evaluation, we extend our dataset to include Process-related Task and design a specialized evaluation method. A newly introduced Process Provider automatically supplies accurate process information, enabling presice assessment of agent's performance. Our evaluation of advanced GUI agents reveals significant limitations for real-world GUI scenarios. These shortcomings are prevalent across diverse models, including both large-scale generalist models and smaller, GUI-specific models. A detailed error analysis further exposes several universal problems, outlining concrete directions for future improvements.

While auxiliary information has become a key to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs), relatively little is known about how well LLMs merge these contexts, specifically generated and retrieved. To study this, we formulate a task specifically designed to identify whether the answers, derived from the integration of generated and retrieved contexts, are attributed to either generated or retrieved contexts. To support this task, we develop a methodology to construct datasets with conflicting contexts, where each question is paired with both generated and retrieved contexts, yet only one of them contains the correct answer. Our experiments reveal a significant bias in LLMs towards generated contexts, as evidenced across state-of-the-art open (Llama2-7b/13b) and closed (GPT 3.5/4) systems. We further identify two key factors contributing to this bias: i) Contexts generated by LLMs typically show greater similarity to the questions, increasing their likelihood of selection; ii) The segmentation process used in retrieved contexts disrupts their completeness, thereby hindering their full utilization in LLMs. Our analysis enhances the understanding of how LLMs merge diverse contexts, offering valuable insights for advancing current augmentation methods for LLMs.

Recommendation systems (RS) help users find interested content and connect authors with their target audience. Most research in RS tends to focus either on predicting users' immediate feedback (like click-through rate) accurately or improving users' long-term engagement. However, they ignore the influence for authors and the lifelong interaction value (LIV) of user-author pairs, which is particularly crucial for improving the prosperity of social community in short-video platforms. Currently, reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize long-term benefits and has been widely applied in RS. In this paper, we introduce RL to Reinforce Lifelong Interaction Value of User-Author pairs (RLIV-UA) based on each interaction of UA pairs. To address the long intervals between UA interactions and the large scale of the UA space, we propose a novel Sparse Cross-Request Interaction Markov Decision Process (SCRI-MDP) and introduce an Adjacent State Approximation (ASA) method to construct RL training samples. Additionally, we introduce Multi-Task Critic Learning (MTCL) to capture the progressive nature of UA interactions (click -> follow -> gift), where denser interaction signals are leveraged to compensate for the learning of sparse labels. Finally, an auxiliary supervised learning task is designed to enhance the convergence of the RLIV-UA model. In offline experiments and online A/B tests, the RLIV-UA model achieves both higher user satisfaction and higher platform profits than compared methods.

Recent approaches to multi-task learning (MTL) have focused on modelling connections between tasks at the decoder level. This leads to a tight coupling between tasks, which need retraining if a new task is inserted or removed. We argue that MTL is a stepping stone towards universal feature learning (UFL), which is the ability to learn generic features that can be applied to new tasks without retraining. We propose Medusa to realize this goal, designing task heads with dual attention mechanisms. The shared feature attention masks relevant backbone features for each task, allowing it to learn a generic representation. Meanwhile, a novel Multi-Scale Attention head allows the network to better combine per-task features from different scales when making the final prediction. We show the effectiveness of Medusa in UFL (+13.18% improvement), while maintaining MTL performance and being 25% more efficient than previous approaches.

Self-supervision as an emerging technique has been employed to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for more transferrable, generalizable, and robust representation learning of images. Its introduction to graph convolutional networks (GCNs) operating on graph data is however rarely explored. In this study, we report the first systematic exploration and assessment of incorporating self-supervision into GCNs. We first elaborate three mechanisms to incorporate self-supervision into GCNs, analyze the limitations of pretraining & finetuning and self-training, and proceed to focus on multi-task learning. Moreover, we propose to investigate three novel self-supervised learning tasks for GCNs with theoretical rationales and numerical comparisons. Lastly, we further integrate multi-task self-supervision into graph adversarial training. Our results show that, with properly designed task forms and incorporation mechanisms, self-supervision benefits GCNs in gaining more generalizability and robustness. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Shen-Lab/SS-GCNs.

Transformer based Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used in many fields, and the efficiency of LLM inference becomes hot topic in real applications. However, LLMs are usually complicatedly designed in model structure with massive operations and perform inference in the auto-regressive mode, making it a challenging task to design a system with high efficiency. In this paper, we propose an efficient LLM inference solution with low latency and high throughput. Firstly, we simplify the LLM decoder layer by fusing data movement and element-wise operations to reduce the memory access frequency and lower system latency. We also propose a segment KV cache policy to keep key/value of the request and response tokens in separate physical memory for effective device memory management, helping enlarge the runtime batch size and improve system throughput. A customized Scaled-Dot-Product-Attention kernel is designed to match our fusion policy based on the segment KV cache solution. We implement our LLM inference solution on Intel GPU and publish it publicly. Compared with the standard HuggingFace implementation, the proposed solution achieves up to 7x lower token latency and 27x higher throughput for some popular LLMs on Intel GPU.

Next location prediction plays a crucial role in various real-world applications. Recently, due to the limitation of existing deep learning methods, attempts have been made to apply large language models (LLMs) to zero-shot next location prediction task. However, they directly generate the final output using LLMs without systematic design, which limits the potential of LLMs to uncover complex mobility patterns and underestimates their extensive reserve of global geospatial knowledge. In this paper, we introduce AgentMove, a systematic agentic prediction framework to achieve generalized next location prediction. In AgentMove, we first decompose the mobility prediction task and design specific modules to complete them, including spatial-temporal memory for individual mobility pattern mining, world knowledge generator for modeling the effects of urban structure and collective knowledge extractor for capturing the shared patterns among population. Finally, we combine the results of three modules and conduct a reasoning step to generate the final predictions. Extensive experiments utilizing mobility data from two distinct sources reveal that AgentMove surpasses the leading baseline by 3.33% to 8.57% across 8 out of 12 metrics and it shows robust predictions with various LLMs as base and also less geographical bias across cities. Our codes are available via https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/AgentMove.

What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks? The strongest vision-language models (VLMs) show such broad visual reasoning is within reach, but the recipe behind them remains unclear, locked behind proprietary reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines with non-public data. We introduce Vero, a family of fully open VLMs that matches or exceeds existing open-weight models across diverse visual reasoning tasks. We scale RL data and rewards across six broad task categories, constructing Vero-600K, a 600K-sample dataset from 59 datasets, and designing task-routed rewards that handle heterogeneous answer formats. Vero achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving over four base models by 3.7-5.5 points on average across VeroEval, our suite of 30 challenging benchmarks. Starting from Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, Vero outperforms Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking on 23 of 30 benchmarks without additional proprietary thinking data. When trained from the same base model, Vero-600K exceeds existing RL datasets across task categories. Systematic ablations reveal that different task categories elicit qualitatively distinct reasoning patterns that transfer poorly in isolation, suggesting that broad data coverage is the primary driver of strong RL scaling. All data, code, and models are released.

We propose a unified framework for motion control in video generation that seamlessly integrates camera movement, object-level translation, and fine-grained local motion using trajectory-based inputs. In contrast to prior methods that address these motion types through separate modules or task-specific designs, our approach offers a cohesive solution by projecting user-defined trajectories into the latent space of pre-trained image-to-video generation models via a lightweight motion injector. Users can specify keypoints and their motion paths to control localized deformations, entire object motion, virtual camera dynamics, or combinations of these. The injected trajectory signals guide the generative process to produce temporally consistent and semantically aligned motion sequences. Our framework demonstrates superior performance across multiple video motion control tasks, including stylized motion effects (e.g., motion brushes), dynamic viewpoint changes, and precise local motion manipulation. Experiments show that our method provides significantly better controllability and visual quality compared to prior approaches and commercial solutions, while remaining broadly compatible with various state-of-the-art video generation backbones. Project page: https://anytraj.github.io/.

Despite their proficiency in general tasks, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with automatic Geometry Problem Solving (GPS), which demands understanding diagrams, interpreting symbols, and performing complex reasoning. This limitation arises from their pre-training on natural images and texts, along with the lack of automated verification in the problem-solving process. Besides, current geometric specialists are limited by their task-specific designs, making them less effective for broader geometric problems. To this end, we present GeoX, a multi-modal large model focusing on geometric understanding and reasoning tasks. Given the significant differences between geometric diagram-symbol and natural image-text, we introduce unimodal pre-training to develop a diagram encoder and symbol decoder, enhancing the understanding of geometric images and corpora. Furthermore, we introduce geometry-language alignment, an effective pre-training paradigm that bridges the modality gap between unimodal geometric experts. We propose a Generator-And-Sampler Transformer (GS-Former) to generate discriminative queries and eliminate uninformative representations from unevenly distributed geometric signals. Finally, GeoX benefits from visual instruction tuning, empowering it to take geometric images and questions as input and generate verifiable solutions. Experiments show that GeoX outperforms both generalists and geometric specialists on publicly recognized benchmarks, such as GeoQA, UniGeo, Geometry3K, and PGPS9k.

Unified visual grounding pursues a simple and generic technical route to leverage multi-task data with less task-specific design. The most advanced methods typically present boxes and masks as vertex sequences to model referring detection and segmentation as an autoregressive sequential vertex generation paradigm. However, generating high-dimensional vertex sequences sequentially is error-prone because the upstream of the sequence remains static and cannot be refined based on downstream vertex information, even if there is a significant location gap. Besides, with limited vertexes, the inferior fitting of objects with complex contours restricts the performance upper bound. To deal with this dilemma, we propose a parallel vertex generation paradigm for superior high-dimension scalability with a diffusion model by simply modifying the noise dimension. An intuitive materialization of our paradigm is Parallel Vertex Diffusion (PVD) to directly set vertex coordinates as the generation target and use a diffusion model to train and infer. We claim that it has two flaws: (1) unnormalized coordinate caused a high variance of loss value; (2) the original training objective of PVD only considers point consistency but ignores geometry consistency. To solve the first flaw, Center Anchor Mechanism (CAM) is designed to convert coordinates as normalized offset values to stabilize the training loss value. For the second flaw, Angle summation loss (ASL) is designed to constrain the geometry difference of prediction and ground truth vertexes for geometry-level consistency. Empirical results show that our PVD achieves state-of-the-art in both referring detection and segmentation, and our paradigm is more scalable and efficient than sequential vertex generation with high-dimension data.

Unified vision-language frameworks have greatly advanced in recent years, most of which adopt an encoder-decoder architecture to unify image-text tasks as sequence-to-sequence generation. However, existing video-language (VidL) models still require task-specific designs in model architecture and training objectives for each task. In this work, we explore a unified VidL framework LAVENDER, where Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is used as the common interface for all pre-training and downstream tasks. Such unification leads to a simplified model architecture, where only a lightweight MLM head, instead of a decoder with much more parameters, is needed on top of the multimodal encoder. Surprisingly, experimental results show that this unified framework achieves competitive performance on 14 VidL benchmarks, covering video question answering, text-to-video retrieval and video captioning. Extensive analyses further demonstrate the advantage of LAVENDER over existing VidL methods in: (i) supporting all downstream tasks with just a single set of parameter values when multi-task finetuned; (ii) few-shot generalization on various downstream tasks; and (iii) enabling zero-shot evaluation on video question answering tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LAVENDER.

Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. Following reasonable procedures and using various support skills can help to effectively provide support. However, due to the lack of a well-designed task and corpora of effective emotional support conversations, research on building emotional support into dialog systems remains untouched. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory. We construct an Emotion Support Conversation dataset (ESConv) with rich annotation (especially support strategy) in a help-seeker and supporter mode. To ensure a corpus of high-quality conversations that provide examples of effective emotional support, we take extensive effort to design training tutorials for supporters and several mechanisms for quality control during data collection. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art dialog models with respect to the ability to provide emotional support. Our results show the importance of support strategies in providing effective emotional support and the utility of ESConv in training more emotional support systems.

The vastness of the design space created by the combination of a large number of computational mechanisms, including machine learning, is an obstacle to creating an artificial general intelligence (AGI). Brain-inspired AGI development, in other words, cutting down the design space to look more like a biological brain, which is an existing model of a general intelligence, is a promising plan for solving this problem. However, it is difficult for an individual to design a software program that corresponds to the entire brain because the neuroscientific data required to understand the architecture of the brain are extensive and complicated. The whole-brain architecture approach divides the brain-inspired AGI development process into the task of designing the brain reference architecture (BRA) -- the flow of information and the diagram of corresponding components -- and the task of developing each component using the BRA. This is called BRA-driven development. Another difficulty lies in the extraction of the operating principles necessary for reproducing the cognitive-behavioral function of the brain from neuroscience data. Therefore, this study proposes the Structure-constrained Interface Decomposition (SCID) method, which is a hypothesis-building method for creating a hypothetical component diagram consistent with neuroscientific findings. The application of this approach has begun for building various regions of the brain. Moving forward, we will examine methods of evaluating the biological plausibility of brain-inspired software. This evaluation will also be used to prioritize different computational mechanisms, which should be merged, associated with the same regions of the brain.

The rapid development of generative AI is a double-edged sword, which not only facilitates content creation but also makes image manipulation easier and more difficult to detect. Although current image forgery detection and localization (IFDL) methods are generally effective, they tend to face two challenges: 1) black-box nature with unknown detection principle, 2) limited generalization across diverse tampering methods (e.g., Photoshop, DeepFake, AIGC-Editing). To address these issues, we propose the explainable IFDL task and design FakeShield, a multi-modal framework capable of evaluating image authenticity, generating tampered region masks, and providing a judgment basis based on pixel-level and image-level tampering clues. Additionally, we leverage GPT-4o to enhance existing IFDL datasets, creating the Multi-Modal Tamper Description dataSet (MMTD-Set) for training FakeShield's tampering analysis capabilities. Meanwhile, we incorporate a Domain Tag-guided Explainable Forgery Detection Module (DTE-FDM) and a Multi-modal Forgery Localization Module (MFLM) to address various types of tamper detection interpretation and achieve forgery localization guided by detailed textual descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FakeShield effectively detects and localizes various tampering techniques, offering an explainable and superior solution compared to previous IFDL methods.

While the diffusion transformer (DiT) has become a focal point of interest in recent years, its application in low-light image enhancement remains a blank area for exploration. Current methods recover the details from low-light images while inevitably amplifying the noise in images, resulting in poor visual quality. In this paper, we firstly introduce DiT into the low-light enhancement task and design a novel Structure-guided Diffusion Transformer based Low-light image enhancement (SDTL) framework. We compress the feature through wavelet transform to improve the inference efficiency of the model and capture the multi-directional frequency band. Then we propose a Structure Enhancement Module (SEM) that uses structural prior to enhance the texture and leverages an adaptive fusion strategy to achieve more accurate enhancement effect. In Addition, we propose a Structure-guided Attention Block (SAB) to pay more attention to texture-riched tokens and avoid interference from noisy areas in noise prediction. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance on several popular datasets, validating the effectiveness of SDTL in improving image quality and the potential of DiT in low-light enhancement tasks.

Recently, 3D generative models have shown promising performances in structure-based drug design by learning to generate ligands given target binding sites. However, only modeling the target-ligand distribution can hardly fulfill one of the main goals in drug discovery -- designing novel ligands with desired properties, e.g., high binding affinity, easily synthesizable, etc. This challenge becomes particularly pronounced when the target-ligand pairs used for training do not align with these desired properties. Moreover, most existing methods aim at solving de novo design task, while many generative scenarios requiring flexible controllability, such as R-group optimization and scaffold hopping, have received little attention. In this work, we propose DecompOpt, a structure-based molecular optimization method based on a controllable and decomposed diffusion model. DecompOpt presents a new generation paradigm which combines optimization with conditional diffusion models to achieve desired properties while adhering to the molecular grammar. Additionally, DecompOpt offers a unified framework covering both de novo design and controllable generation. To achieve so, ligands are decomposed into substructures which allows fine-grained control and local optimization. Experiments show that DecompOpt can efficiently generate molecules with improved properties than strong de novo baselines, and demonstrate great potential in controllable generation tasks.

Electric autonomous vehicles (EAVs) are getting attention in future autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems due to their economic and societal benefits. However, EAVs' unique charging patterns (long charging time, high charging frequency, unpredictable charging behaviors, etc.) make it challenging to accurately predict the EAVs supply in E-AMoD systems. Furthermore, the mobility demand's prediction uncertainty makes it an urgent and challenging task to design an integrated vehicle balancing solution under supply and demand uncertainties. Despite the success of reinforcement learning-based E-AMoD balancing algorithms, state uncertainties under the EV supply or mobility demand remain unexplored. In this work, we design a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based framework for EAVs balancing in E-AMoD systems, with adversarial agents to model both the EAVs supply and mobility demand uncertainties that may undermine the vehicle balancing solutions. We then propose a robust E-AMoD Balancing MARL (REBAMA) algorithm to train a robust EAVs balancing policy to balance both the supply-demand ratio and charging utilization rate across the whole city. Experiments show that our proposed robust method performs better compared with a non-robust MARL method that does not consider state uncertainties; it improves the reward, charging utilization fairness, and supply-demand fairness by 19.28%, 28.18%, and 3.97%, respectively. Compared with a robust optimization-based method, the proposed MARL algorithm can improve the reward, charging utilization fairness, and supply-demand fairness by 8.21%, 8.29%, and 9.42%, respectively.

Videos convey richer information than images or text, capturing both spatial and temporal dynamics. However, most existing video customization methods rely on reference images or task-specific temporal priors, failing to fully exploit the rich spatio-temporal information inherent in videos, thereby limiting flexibility and generalization in video generation. To address these limitations, we propose OmniTransfer, a unified framework for spatio-temporal video transfer. It leverages multi-view information across frames to enhance appearance consistency and exploits temporal cues to enable fine-grained temporal control. To unify various video transfer tasks, OmniTransfer incorporates three key designs: Task-aware Positional Bias that adaptively leverages reference video information to improve temporal alignment or appearance consistency; Reference-decoupled Causal Learning separating reference and target branches to enable precise reference transfer while improving efficiency; and Task-adaptive Multimodal Alignment using multimodal semantic guidance to dynamically distinguish and tackle different tasks. Extensive experiments show that OmniTransfer outperforms existing methods in appearance (ID and style) and temporal transfer (camera movement and video effects), while matching pose-guided methods in motion transfer without using pose, establishing a new paradigm for flexible, high-fidelity video generation.

The reference-based object segmentation tasks, namely referring image segmentation (RIS), few-shot image segmentation (FSS), referring video object segmentation (RVOS), and video object segmentation (VOS), aim to segment a specific object by utilizing either language or annotated masks as references. Despite significant progress in each respective field, current methods are task-specifically designed and developed in different directions, which hinders the activation of multi-task capabilities for these tasks. In this work, we end the current fragmented situation and propose UniRef++ to unify the four reference-based object segmentation tasks with a single architecture. At the heart of our approach is the proposed UniFusion module which performs multiway-fusion for handling different tasks with respect to their specified references. And a unified Transformer architecture is then adopted for achieving instance-level segmentation. With the unified designs, UniRef++ can be jointly trained on a broad range of benchmarks and can flexibly complete multiple tasks at run-time by specifying the corresponding references. We evaluate our unified models on various benchmarks. Extensive experimental results indicate that our proposed UniRef++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on RIS and RVOS, and performs competitively on FSS and VOS with a parameter-shared network. Moreover, we showcase that the proposed UniFusion module could be easily incorporated into the current advanced foundation model SAM and obtain satisfactory results with parameter-efficient finetuning. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniRef.

Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

We investigate the potential of GPT-4~gpt4 to perform Neural Architecture Search (NAS) -- the task of designing effective neural architectures. Our proposed approach, GPT-4 Enhanced Neural archItectUre Search (GENIUS), leverages the generative capabilities of GPT-4 as a black-box optimiser to quickly navigate the architecture search space, pinpoint promising candidates, and iteratively refine these candidates to improve performance. We assess GENIUS across several benchmarks, comparing it with existing state-of-the-art NAS techniques to illustrate its effectiveness. Rather than targeting state-of-the-art performance, our objective is to highlight GPT-4's potential to assist research on a challenging technical problem through a simple prompting scheme that requires relatively limited domain expertiseCode available at \href{https://github.com/mingkai-zheng/GENIUS{https://github.com/mingkai-zheng/GENIUS}.}. More broadly, we believe our preliminary results point to future research that harnesses general purpose language models for diverse optimisation tasks. We also highlight important limitations to our study, and note implications for AI safety.

Significant progress in reward modeling over recent years has been driven by a paradigm shift from task-specific designs towards generalist reward models. Despite this trend, developing effective reward models remains a fundamental challenge: the heavy reliance on large-scale labeled preference data. Pre-training on abundant unlabeled data offers a promising direction, but existing approaches fall short of instilling explicit reasoning into reward models. To bridge this gap, we propose a self-training approach that leverages unlabeled data to elicit reward reasoning in reward models. Based on this approach, we develop GRAM-R^2, a generative reward model trained to produce not only preference labels but also accompanying reward rationales. GRAM-R^2 can serve as a foundation model for reward reasoning and can be applied to a wide range of tasks with minimal or no additional fine-tuning. It can support downstream applications such as response ranking and task-specific reward tuning. Experiments on response ranking, task adaptation, and reinforcement learning from human feedback demonstrate that GRAM-R^2 consistently delivers strong performance, outperforming several strong discriminative and generative baselines.

In this paper, we extend financial sentiment analysis~(FSA) to event-level since events usually serve as the subject of the sentiment in financial text. Though extracting events from the financial text may be conducive to accurate sentiment predictions, it has specialized challenges due to the lengthy and discontinuity of events in a financial text. To this end, we reconceptualize the event extraction as a classification task by designing a categorization comprising coarse-grained and fine-grained event categories. Under this setting, we formulate the Event-Level Financial Sentiment Analysis~(EFSA for short) task that outputs quintuples consisting of (company, industry, coarse-grained event, fine-grained event, sentiment) from financial text. A large-scale Chinese dataset containing 12,160 news articles and 13,725 quintuples is publicized as a brand new testbed for our task. A four-hop Chain-of-Thought LLM-based approach is devised for this task. Systematically investigations are conducted on our dataset, and the empirical results demonstrate the benchmarking scores of existing methods and our proposed method can reach the current state-of-the-art. Our dataset and framework implementation are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EFSA-645E

In this paper, we present a novel sequence generation-based framework for lane detection, called Lane2Seq. It unifies various lane detection formats by casting lane detection as a sequence generation task. This is different from previous lane detection methods, which depend on well-designed task-specific head networks and corresponding loss functions. Lane2Seq only adopts a plain transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture with a simple cross-entropy loss. Additionally, we propose a new multi-format model tuning based on reinforcement learning to incorporate the task-specific knowledge into Lane2Seq. Experimental results demonstrate that such a simple sequence generation paradigm not only unifies lane detection but also achieves competitive performance on benchmarks. For example, Lane2Seq gets 97.95\% and 97.42\% F1 score on Tusimple and LLAMAS datasets, establishing a new state-of-the-art result for two benchmarks.

3D vision-language grounding (3D-VL) is an emerging field that aims to connect the 3D physical world with natural language, which is crucial for achieving embodied intelligence. Current 3D-VL models rely heavily on sophisticated modules, auxiliary losses, and optimization tricks, which calls for a simple and unified model. In this paper, we propose 3D-VisTA, a pre-trained Transformer for 3D Vision and Text Alignment that can be easily adapted to various downstream tasks. 3D-VisTA simply utilizes self-attention layers for both single-modal modeling and multi-modal fusion without any sophisticated task-specific design. To further enhance its performance on 3D-VL tasks, we construct ScanScribe, the first large-scale 3D scene-text pairs dataset for 3D-VL pre-training. ScanScribe contains 2,995 RGB-D scans for 1,185 unique indoor scenes originating from ScanNet and 3R-Scan datasets, along with paired 278K scene descriptions generated from existing 3D-VL tasks, templates, and GPT-3. 3D-VisTA is pre-trained on ScanScribe via masked language/object modeling and scene-text matching. It achieves state-of-the-art results on various 3D-VL tasks, ranging from visual grounding and dense captioning to question answering and situated reasoning. Moreover, 3D-VisTA demonstrates superior data efficiency, obtaining strong performance even with limited annotations during downstream task fine-tuning.

Recent studies have shown the impressive efficacy of counterfactually augmented data (CAD) for reducing NLU models' reliance on spurious features and improving their generalizability. However, current methods still heavily rely on human efforts or task-specific designs to generate counterfactuals, thereby impeding CAD's applicability to a broad range of NLU tasks. In this paper, we present AutoCAD, a fully automatic and task-agnostic CAD generation framework. AutoCAD first leverages a classifier to unsupervisedly identify rationales as spans to be intervened, which disentangles spurious and causal features. Then, AutoCAD performs controllable generation enhanced by unlikelihood training to produce diverse counterfactuals. Extensive evaluations on multiple out-of-domain and challenge benchmarks demonstrate that AutoCAD consistently and significantly boosts the out-of-distribution performance of powerful pre-trained models across different NLU tasks, which is comparable or even better than previous state-of-the-art human-in-the-loop or task-specific CAD methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/AutoCAD.

For a long time, different recommendation tasks typically require designing task-specific architectures and training objectives. As a result, it is hard to transfer the learned knowledge and representations from one task to another, thus restricting the generalization ability of existing recommendation approaches, e.g., a sequential recommendation model can hardly be applied or transferred to a review generation method. To deal with such issues, considering that language can describe almost anything and language grounding is a powerful medium to represent various problems or tasks, we present a flexible and unified text-to-text paradigm called "Pretrain, Personalized Prompt, and Predict Paradigm" (P5) for recommendation, which unifies various recommendation tasks in a shared framework. In P5, all data such as user-item interactions, user descriptions, item metadata, and user reviews are converted to a common format -- natural language sequences. The rich information from natural language assists P5 to capture deeper semantics for personalization and recommendation. Specifically, P5 learns different tasks with the same language modeling objective during pretraining. Thus, it serves as the foundation model for various downstream recommendation tasks, allows easy integration with other modalities, and enables instruction-based recommendation based on prompts. P5 advances recommender systems from shallow model to deep model to big model, and will revolutionize the technical form of recommender systems towards universal recommendation engine. With adaptive personalized prompt for different users, P5 is able to make predictions in a zero-shot or few-shot manner and largely reduces the necessity for extensive fine-tuning. On several recommendation benchmarks, we conduct experiments to show the effectiveness of P5. We release the source code at https://github.com/jeykigung/P5.

Recent advances in generative diffusion models have enabled text-controlled synthesis of realistic and diverse images with impressive quality. Despite these remarkable advances, the application of text-to-image generative models in computer vision for standard visual recognition tasks remains limited. The current de facto approach for these tasks is to design model architectures and loss functions that are tailored to the task at hand. In this paper, we develop a unified language interface for computer vision tasks that abstracts away task-specific design choices and enables task execution by following natural language instructions. Our approach involves casting multiple computer vision tasks as text-to-image generation problems. Here, the text represents an instruction describing the task, and the resulting image is a visually-encoded task output. To train our model, we pool commonly-used computer vision datasets covering a range of tasks, including segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and classification. We then use a large language model to paraphrase prompt templates that convey the specific tasks to be conducted on each image, and through this process, we create a multi-modal and multi-task training dataset comprising input and output images along with annotated instructions. Following the InstructPix2Pix architecture, we apply instruction-tuning to a text-to-image diffusion model using our constructed dataset, steering its functionality from a generative model to an instruction-guided multi-task vision learner. Experiments demonstrate that our model, dubbed InstructCV, performs competitively compared to other generalist and task-specific vision models. Moreover, it exhibits compelling generalization capabilities to unseen data, categories, and user instructions.

Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with explicit reasoning trajectories can enhance their reasoning abilities. However, acquiring such high-quality trajectory data typically demands meticulous supervision from humans or superior models, which can be either expensive or license-constrained. In this paper, we explore how far an LLM can improve its reasoning by self-synthesizing reasoning paths as training data without any additional supervision. Existing self-synthesizing methods, such as STaR, suffer from poor generalization to out-of-domain (OOD) reasoning tasks. We hypothesize it is due to that their self-synthesized reasoning paths are too task-specific, lacking general task-agnostic reasoning guidance. To address this, we propose Reasoning Generalist via Self-Improvement (ReGenesis), a method to self-synthesize reasoning paths as post-training data by progressing from abstract to concrete. More specifically, ReGenesis self-synthesizes reasoning paths by converting general reasoning guidelines into task-specific ones, generating reasoning structures, and subsequently transforming these structures into reasoning paths, without the need for human-designed task-specific examples used in existing methods. We show that ReGenesis achieves superior performance on all in-domain and OOD settings tested compared to existing methods. For six OOD tasks specifically, while previous methods exhibited an average performance decrease of approximately 4.6% after post training, ReGenesis delivers around 6.1% performance improvement. We also conduct in-depth analysis of our framework and show ReGenesis is effective across various LLMs and design choices.

We introduce AutoMonitor-Bench, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the reliability of LLM-based misbehavior monitors across diverse tasks and failure modes. AutoMonitor-Bench consists of 3,010 carefully annotated test samples spanning question answering, code generation, and reasoning, with paired misbehavior and benign instances. We evaluate monitors using two complementary metrics: Miss Rate (MR) and False Alarm Rate (FAR), capturing failures to detect misbehavior and oversensitivity to benign behavior, respectively. Evaluating 12 proprietary and 10 open-source LLMs, we observe substantial variability in monitoring performance and a consistent trade-off between MR and FAR, revealing an inherent safety-utility tension. To further explore the limits of monitor reliability, we construct a large-scale training corpus of 153,581 samples and fine-tune Qwen3-4B-Instruction to investigate whether training on known, relatively easy-to-construct misbehavior datasets improves monitoring performance on unseen and more implicit misbehaviors. Our results highlight the challenges of reliable, scalable misbehavior monitoring and motivate future work on task-aware designing and training strategies for LLM-based monitors.

We present SPHINX, a versatile multi-modal large language model (MLLM) with a joint mixing of model weights, tuning tasks, and visual embeddings. First, for stronger vision-language alignment, we unfreeze the large language model (LLM) during pre-training, and introduce a weight mix strategy between LLMs trained by real-world and synthetic data. By directly integrating the weights from two domains, the mixed LLM can efficiently incorporate diverse semantics with favorable robustness. Then, to enable multi-purpose capabilities, we mix a variety of tasks for joint visual instruction tuning, and design task-specific instructions to avoid inter-task conflict. In addition to the basic visual question answering, we include more challenging tasks such as region-level understanding, caption grounding, document layout detection, and human pose estimation, contributing to mutual enhancement over different scenarios. Additionally, we propose to extract comprehensive visual embeddings from various network architectures, pre-training paradigms, and information granularity, providing language models with more robust image representations. Based on our proposed joint mixing, SPHINX exhibits superior multi-modal understanding capabilities on a wide range of applications. On top of this, we further propose an efficient strategy aiming to better capture fine-grained appearances of high-resolution images. With a mixing of different scales and high-resolution sub-images, SPHINX attains exceptional visual parsing and reasoning performance on existing evaluation benchmarks. We hope our work may cast a light on the exploration of joint mixing in future MLLM research. Code is released at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory.