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Diffusion models have strong generative capabilities. However, their maximum likelihood training objective only focuses on reconstructing the data distribution, making it difficult to align with specific preferences. Reinforcement learning (RL) for preference alignment in diffusion models is promising but limited by reward sparsity. Since a single reward cannot support optimization, existing RL methods usually backpropagate the final reward to all previous steps. However, denoising is stage-wise, with distinct semantics and controllability. Repeating the final reward across all steps creates a temporal objective mismatch, encouraging reward shortcuts that lead to reward hacking. At the same time, due to reward backfilling, each time step receives the same reward, making it impossible to distinguish between actions, thereby weakening the optimization process. To resolve this issue, we propose Stage-Guided Per-Step Optimization (SGPO) for diffusion models, which jointly leverages signal-to-noise ratio and semantic changes to identify generation stages and adaptively assign stage-specific objectives. Early denoising is chaotic and far from the final reward, resulting in weak reward-behavior correlation. This stage should prioritize exiting the chaotic state. In the mid stage, the latent transitions to a stable structure, where the final reward better corresponds to generative behavior. Therefore, this stage optimizes the final reward while exploring diversity to avoid early convergence to a single mode. In the late stage, the latent's core structure is largely fixed, and preference optimization mainly amplifies local details, risking overfitting. Therefore, stable convergence is preferred to avoid quality degradation. Results from 16 comparative experiments validate SGPO. Our method achieves 26.7% average gains in generative quality and 36.7% higher convergence speed.

Diffusion-based face restoration that adjusts the sampling trajectory of pre-trained diffusion models has achieved remarkable progress. However, existing approaches provide insufficient constraints during reverse diffusion, causing identity-related structural drift and degraded fidelity under severe degradations. To address this, we propose WaveFreqAnchor, a training-free framework based on Wave-Structural Anchoring and Frequency Correction Diffusion. Specifically, Anchor-Space Wave-Structural Guidance (ASWG) constrains facial structures through anisotropic wave-response consistency, while Multi-scale Wavelet-Fourier Injection (MWFI) aligns the predicted low-frequency subband with the observation by replacing its phase, correcting inconsistencies accumulated during reverse diffusion. For real-world scenes, we further introduce Subband High-Frequency Enhancement (SHE), which performs bounded, spatially masked refinement on the predicted high-frequency subbands to recover fine facial details under unknown compound degradations. Together, these designs effectively preserve facial identity while restoring sharp and realistic facial details. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving high-quality and high-fidelity face restoration.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in image restoration tasks. However, when guiding image reconstruction, existing Diffusion Model-based Image Restoration (DMIR) methods typically rely on fixed data constraints and uniform step sizes, thereby overlooking the dynamic nature of the generative process. Such rigid designs render the models vulnerable to spatially non-uniform degradations, thus resulting in structural distortions and loss of fine details. Meanwhile, uniform step sizes introduce computational redundancy, whereas naïve step reduction strategies tend to accumulate approximation errors. To address these limitations, we propose a Local Epistemic Uncertainty Guided Active Sampling framework (LEADer). In the spatial domain, LEADer leverages pixel-wise uncertainty to dynamically modulate the prior strength within the null space, which effectively balances detail preservation and artifact suppression. In the temporal domain, it quantifies sampling stability via the uncertainty trace to enable adaptive trajectory pruning, thereby accelerating convergence. Theoretical proofs demonstrate that our framework achieves strict data consistency, while the trajectory pruning strategy admits a deterministic error bound, thereby guaranteeing stable convergence under skip sampling. Notably, our plug-and-play method can be seamlessly integrated into various DMIR baselines. Extensive experiments show that LEADer improves the performance of multiple state-of-the-art DMIR methods, while significantly reducing sampling time with negligible memory overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/JiaqiZhang-Sengoku/LEADer.

Training changes a network's predictions while allocating task-relevant structure across its internal units. In an overparameterized ReLU network, several neurons can begin with exactly the same functional role, yet one may acquire a teacher feature while the others become redundant. We call the identity of that neuron feature ownership and ask whether it can be controlled by a parameter choice invisible to the initial predictor. In a tractable Gaussian teacher--student model, we fix the complete initial function and vary only a positive-homogeneous scaling gauge. Opposite gauges produce distinct feature trajectories and a sharp $Θ(D^2)$ separation in specialization time that no global change of clock can explain. Among any fixed number of initially duplicate students, assigning the favorable gauge to one neuron deterministically selects it as the owner and drives the remaining functional contribution to zero. An exact reaction--transport decomposition attributes the effect to different mobilities for changing a feature's coefficient and direction. We prove global selection and functional pruning, extend finite-time selection to visible perturbations and small-step full-batch gradient descent, and verify the predicted loss, alignment, pruning, and dissipation trajectories in population and finite-sample training. The initial predictor therefore determines neither when the feature is learned nor which neuron learns it.

Credit assignment in multi-turn agent reinforcement learning operates at two levels: assigning trajectory-level credit to actions and distributing each action's credit across its tokens. In this paper, we introduce FACTOR, which separates these decisions. FACTOR uses checkpoint-calibrated TD residuals to assign per-action credits that telescope to the trajectory advantage, and feedback-conditioned teacher-student likelihood gaps to allocate each credit across the realized action tokens. Per-action normalization preserves the action-average coefficient and prevents token-level sign flips. We pair this construction with an action-mean reduction, removing the implicit dependence of an action's scalar surrogate weight on its token length. At the behavior policy and before clipping, each action's inner action-mean surrogate equals its TD credit. FACTOR consistently improves over competitive baselines across ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld, with every environment-seed comparison favoring FACTOR and the largest gains emerging on the longest-horizon environment. The same hyperparameters transfer without retuning to a larger backbone and to a different model family. Ablations identify TD action credit as the dominant driver of the improvement, with hindsight token allocation contributing complementary gains.

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts with token-level supervision from teacher models, but its effectiveness can depend strongly on the warm-up stage before OPD. In this paper, we demystify warm-up for OPD from both data and training perspectives. For data, we find that effective warm-up relies on teacher-compatible chain-of-thought supervision, and that even incorrect teacher rollouts can provide comparable benefits to correct ones. This suggests that warm-up primarily transfers a teacher-compatible thinking pattern rather than merely correct answers. For training, we show that low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with a near-saturation training duration better balances in-domain adaptation and out-of-distribution generalization than full-parameter SFT. Based on these findings, we propose Simple-OPD, a plug-and-play initialization method that warms up the student on teacher-generated CoT with LoRA before OPD. Experiments across diverse settings demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of Simple-OPD.

We study the problem of inserting new furniture into indoor scene images. Under masked single-view 2D image-plane conditioning, however, the physical scale of the inserted furniture relative to the scene cannot be uniquely determined, making physically grounded furniture placement underdetermined from image evidence alone. We therefore reformulate the task as a combination of 3D pose inference and geometry-guided image generation, where estimating a geometrically plausible 3D placement is essential for reliable synthesis. To this end, we propose a two-stage framework. For 3D placement, we introduce GOPI, a generation-oriented 3D pose inference framework that addresses the underdetermined nature of single-view furniture insertion through data-driven iterative inference, producing geometrically plausible object placements. For image generation, we develop a geometry-guided conditioning strategy that projects the inferred 3D pose into the image plane as a pixel-aligned constraint, enforcing consistency between the synthesized image and the underlying 3D geometry. Experimental results validate the proposed framework from both 3D pose estimation and image synthesis perspectives. For 3D placement, GOPI produces poses with stronger geometric feasibility and better consistency with reference layouts than direct regression and vanilla baselines. For image synthesis, our method preserves alignment with the projected 3D geometry across different furniture scales, showing stable projection-generation alignment across the tested furniture scales.

World Action Models (WAMs) aim to construct a unified architecture capable of understanding world state evolution and guiding to generative motion planning. However, existing visual branches focus on predicting static visual observation, rather than reflecting potential transition information that captures the evolution of world states under motion interactions. This leads to representational entanglement between high-level physical condition evolution and low-level action trajectory generation within the Action Model, creating a structural bottleneck while weakening the predictive capability of world evolution modeling for action generation. We propose PILOT (Physical Inference for Latent Optimized Trajectories), whose core Representational Deduction (RD) bridges this gap by integrating motion thought-of-chain (CoT) guidance as a native model capability. Specifically, RD aims to encourage the action branch to explicitly model potential state transition tokens, which are retained as CoT in the reasoning space to guide fine-grained motion trajectory. Experiments demonstrate that RD not only significantly improves the success rate and generalization ability of WAMs in complex robotic manipulation tasks but also enhances the model's physical interpretability by decoupling high-level motion semantics from low-level trajectory details. Furthermore, the abundant state transition supervision signals introduced by RD effectively alleviate the sparse supervision in action generation, enabling it to serve as an efficient few-shot real-robot fine-tuning strategy and demonstrating superior scalability for migration to mainstream WAM architectures.

Learning structured and control-relevant latent representations remains a key challenge for world models. Recent JEPA-based world models learn action-conditioned predictive latent dynamics from observation sequences. However, their forward-prediction objectives do not explicitly enforce reliable identifiability of robot-centric physical state from individual latents or state changes from latent pairs, which can limit downstream planning and policy performance. We propose PSG-JEPA, a physically grounded JEPA world model that shapes its latent space with two complementary grounding objectives beyond forward prediction: grounding individual latents in robot proprioceptive state, and grounding latent pairs in multi-horizon joint-angle changes. Both objectives are applied only during training, leaving the inference architecture and computational cost unchanged. To comprehensively evaluate PSG-JEPA, we conduct experiments at three levels: (1) latent identifiability via probing, (2) goal-conditioned planning on frozen latents, and (3) policy learning in simulation and on a real robot. Experiments demonstrate that our PSG-JEPA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art latent world-model baselines at all three levels.

Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved impressive performance in recipe generation from food images.However, cooking is a structured transformation process in which ingredients undergo state changes through ordered actions,while free-form recipe language leaves the corresponding entities, intermediate states, and dependencies largely implicit and entangled.A graph representation makes this procedural knowledge explicit and compositional, providing a structured basis for assessing whether model outputs encode process-level knowledge rather than merely presenting plausible textual descriptions. To address this limitation, we present ReGraph, a large-scale recipe graph dataset that represents ingredients, cooking actions, and tools as entities, uses entity attributes to describe ingredient state changes, and employs typed relations to encode manipulation targets, destinations, and procedural ordering. ReGraph further incorporates explicit Recipe Reasoning Chain-of-Thought (RR-CoT) traces, providing auxiliary supervision for procedural decomposition and structured graph generation. Building on ReGraph, we propose Recipe Graph Learning (RGL), a two-stage framework that enables LMMs to generate a plausible fine-grained cooking workflow from a food image in the form of a structured recipe graph. Under a deterministic, schema-aware matching protocol, our experiments reveal a substantial gap between text-generation quality and recoverable procedural structure: recipes produced by existing approaches achieve competitive text-generation scores yet yield limited reference-aligned entity and relation structure under the ReGraph schema. In contrast, across two representative LMM backbones, RGL consistently improves the generation of cooking entities and procedural relations, while our analysis further shows that fine-grained ingredient-state capture remains the most challenging dimension.

Detailed audio-video joint captioning is essential for multimodal video understanding and generation. However, prior works are constrained by three main limitations: (1) the scarcity of high-quality public datasets with fine-grained audio-visual joint captions; (2) reinforcement-learning methods that rely on coarse reward signals; and (3) the lack of a benchmark and metric for evaluating detailed audiovisual captions at the atomic level. To address these challenges, we propose: (1) AVCap-100K, a high-quality dataset of 100K temporally aligned, detail-rich audio-video captions; (2) AVCap, a model optimized via Detail-Aware GRPO (Da-GRPO) that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models and matches or surpasses proprietary models on several evaluations; and (3) AVCap-Bench and AVCap-Score, a specialized benchmark and metric for evaluating atomic-level details in audiovisual captions. Our code, models, and datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/Apryle/avcap.

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across diverse vision-language tasks, creating an urgent need for more challenging benchmarks. Yet existing evaluations still provide limited insight into whether these models can truly reason over structured visual information. Visual Graph Reasoning (VGR) offers a compelling testbed for this challenge, requiring models to integrate perception, structural understanding, and multi-step reasoning over graph-based visual inputs. However, prior VGR benchmarks often reduce the task to visual perception followed by text-based reasoning, restrict evaluation to single-image settings, rely on answer-only metrics, and underrepresent realistic graph-centric scenarios. To bridge the gap, we introduce GraphVerse, a unified benchmark that jointly evaluates perception, visual reasoning, and text-based graph reasoning in MLLMs under both single-image and paired-image settings. At its core is a suite of Graph-centric Image Editing (GIE) strategies that modify graph images while preserving their semantics, turning them into active tests of visual reasoning. We further propose VGR-Score, a process-sensitive metric that evaluates reasoning quality beyond final-answer accuracy. Extensive experiments reveal several key limitations of current MLLMs in VGR, while also validating the effectiveness of GIE strategies and the transferability of GraphVerse to broader multimodal reasoning capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/GraphVerse.

While diffusion models have made significant progress in text-to-image tasks, they still exhibit limitations when directly optimizing downstream objectives. Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables targeted optimization, existing methods are generally constrained by low-efficiency fine-tuning and sparse rewards. To address these challenges, we propose PAST, which provides differentiated rewards while adaptively regulating training episode length by jointly perceiving denoising progress and prompt difficulty. Specifically, we design an intrinsic reward paradigm to compensate for sparse extrinsic rewards and guide the model to explore paths that diverge more efficiently from noise patterns. We further provide theoretical justification for intrinsic rewards. Then, PAST dynamically monitors denoising completion and semantic alignment between image structures and prompt semantics. When both metrics satisfy generation requirements, the system adaptively terminates training. This enables appropriate allocation of episode lengths based on prompt difficulty and the current generation process. Finally, based on the predicted residual noise level, we establish a dual adaptive coordination mechanism. Specifically, it not only balances the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards but also balances the exploration and convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that PAST enhances computational efficiency of existing RL fine-tuning methods by up to 66.7%, while improving preference optimization quality by up to 29.5% through its dual adaptive regulation mechanism.

With the rise of AI-generated content (AIGC) and advanced techniques for 3D human representation, the task of generating 3D dance movements has become an exciting area of research. Despite significant advancements, current methods often fail to provide comprehensive and distinct control over various multimodal inputs from users, such as music or specific descriptions of desired movements. As a result, the generated motions may be statistically plausible and technically correct, but they often lack depth, expressiveness, and alignment with the user's creative vision. To address this issue, we present CustomDance, a coarse-to-fine interactive system designed for customized 3D dance generation. Inspired by the workflows of expert choreographers, CustomDance introduces a novel paradigm to AI-assisted choreography through three interconnected stages. First, a multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) analyzes the music and a high-level text prompt to identify key temporal anchors and creative cues for the piece. Next, for each anchor, a multimodal retriever suggests high-quality motion clips from a dance library based on local music and text, empowering the user with concrete and predictable options. Finally, a custom music-conditioned diffusion in-painter seamlessly connects the selected phrases, allowing for iterative, user-guided refinement of the final composition, supported by visualizations of motion dynamics. Our evaluations demonstrate that CustomDance not only highlights the significant creative utility and empowering potential of our AI-assisted choreography paradigm, but also outperforms competitive baselines across quantitative and qualitative comparisons.

Latent world models plan by predicting future states from an action, but when a scene contains motion the agent does not control, they quietly go action-blind: predictions for different actions become indistinguishable even as the training loss keeps improving. Existing remedies suppress this distraction with reconstruction, task reward, or auxiliary objectives, each adding machinery or assumptions. We show that a minimal alternative suffices, borrowed from the dueling decomposition of value into a state baseline and an action advantage: in latent dynamics, subtracting a prediction's mean effect over actions cancels whatever the actions share--the action-independent variation where distractors live--leaving a clean, controllable channel, with no reward, no reconstruction, and no distractor-specific auxiliary loss. Because this is only a subtraction at readout time, it applies unchanged to any action-conditioned world model, including frozen pretrained ones. Across a gridworld, synthetic generators with known factors, distracting continuous control, and natural-pixel Atari, the isolated channel recovers the agent's own effect where entangled predictors fail, with nuisance leak indistinguishable from zero; applied post hoc it surfaces an action channel in off-the-shelf models that their raw readouts miss, and it converts into goal-reaching control in the gridworld. We prove the cancellation is exact in finite samples for both discrete and sampled action sets, and we state its measured boundary--distractors whose motion tracks the action--together with the remaining limitations in the appendix.

The understanding of natural human adaptation during exoskeleton-assisted locomotion - particularly individual differences in adaptation behaviors and temporal progression - remains limited. In this work, we investigate temporal evolution of biomechanical variables to uncover participant-specific adaptation strategies across different exoskeleton-assisted locomotion scenarios. Nine healthy participants performed treadmill walking under three conditions: without an exoskeleton, with exoskeleton active ankle assistance, and with exoskeleton zero-torque. Lower limb kinematics, inter-joint coordination, and metabolic cost of transport (MCoT) were analyzed at both the group and individual levels. Results indicate that adaptation is gradual and highly individualized, with substantial variability in convergence timing and movement patterns across participants. Kinematic adaptation occurred asynchronously across lower limb, with larger fluctuations during the swing phase. Metabolic responses were heterogeneous and often non-convergent, highlighting the limitations of steady-state assumptions commonly adopted in the literature. These findings emphasize the importance of individual-level, temporal evolution analyses for understanding adaptation dynamics in exoskeleton use.

Regional image editing has attracted considerable attention for its spatial controllability. Although instruction-based and mask-reference-based editing methods can achieve strong semantic alignment, reliable regional control remains challenging, where an edit must be accurately localized and naturally integrated with the preserved context. We propose MaskFlow, a training framework for precise localization, consistent background preservation, and seamless boundary transitions. MaskFlow incorporates the mask into the probability path and flow-matching objective, coordinating generation within the editable region with source preservation outside it. The proposed Soft-Poisson de-seaming module further refines the predicted vector field during both training and sampling to improve the smooth integration of the edited foreground with the preserved background. We also design a data synthesis pipeline to construct MEData, a mask-based image editing dataset for training regional image editing models and facilitating further research. Experiments on natural scenes and infographic images demonstrate consistent improvements over competing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

This paper introduces Mixtures of Geodesic Factor Analyzers (MGFA) on Riemannian homogeneous spaces. MGFA uses a geodesic factor model within each mixture component, providing greater expressiveness than mixtures of Riemannian radial distributions and enabling clustering of manifold-valued data with anisotropic subpopulations. We establish root-$n$ consistency for the MGFA maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), thereby filling a theoretical gap for mixtures of Riemannian radial distributions as a special case. We also propose an iterative estimation algorithm and implement it on spheres, shape spaces, and hyperbolic spaces. Numerical experiments show that MGFA substantially outperforms competing methods in well-specified regimes while remaining robust under model misspecification. Finally, case studies on corpus callosum and left hippocampus shape datasets demonstrate MGFA's effectiveness for both 2D contour and 3D shape analysis.

Generative models for matter are often evaluated as samplers over output representations, and their latent spaces are commonly used as proxies for navigating chemical space. Much less is known about how these models internally arrange discrete chemical identities within those representations. We study this arrangement by making molecular identity explicit and pulling it back through the generative process. Through these pullbacks we probe the regions that generate the same object, exposing the trained model's internal repertoire: a fixed partition that determines which objects (novel or not) the model can produce. Across three molecular generative architectures, we find that this repertoire is arranged into piecewise-constant regions separated by recurring coarse-to-fine boundaries. Its organization depends on the representation probed, the identity convention, decoder stochasticity, and the metric used to compare coordinates. During training, local chemical organization stabilizes while the number of distinct molecular identities represented within each neighborhood continues to change. Internal organization must therefore be characterized, rather than assumed, before a generative space can be treated as chemically navigable.

Training-free text-to-high-resolution image generation has recently attracted growing research attention. However, existing studies on this task primarily focus on adapting off-the-shelf U-Net-based diffusion models to high resolutions, with limited progress on adapting off-the-shelf Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models despite their strong text-to-image generation capabilities at limited resolutions. In this work, we find two key challenges particularly hindering the application of off-the-shelf DiT models for high-resolution image synthesis in a training-free manner, namely, spatial disorder and long generation time. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method tailored to adapt off-the-shelf DiT models for high-resolution image synthesis. Extensive experiments show the efficacy of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zylwithxy/HRDiT.

Bidirectional unpaired image translation must preserve source-specific structure while learning coherent transformations in both directions without paired supervision. Existing methods typically employ two direction-specific generators or train separate one-way models. Even when linked by cycle consistency, such models constrain only the round-trip endpoint reconstruction, without requiring the two directions to obey a common local transformation rule. We propose UniCycleFlow, a rectified-flow framework that represents bidirectional translation as forward and reverse integration of a single time-conditioned velocity field. This formulation organizes both directions within the same continuous dynamics, rather than coupling otherwise separate endpoint mappings. A key challenge is that unpaired data provide no meaningful source--target coupling from which rectified-flow trajectories can be constructed. UniCycleFlow addresses this challenge by learning deterministic source-conditioned endpoints whose marginal distributions are adversarially matched to the opposite domains. The resulting paths are regularized by stop-gradient self-flow matching for intermediate velocity supervision, discrete cycle closure for forward--reverse consistency, and representation path-velocity regularization for controlling localized feature changes along the trajectory. Across ten translation directions, UniCycleFlow achieves the lowest FID on 7 of 10 tasks using a single Euler evaluation and obtains the best average FID of 55.1.

Simulating complex fluid flows requires capturing full equilibrium distributions rather than just mean trajectories, yet high-fidelity solvers remain computationally prohibitive. Recent advances, such as Diffusion Graph Networks (DGNs), have combined diffusion models with graph neural networks to sample equilibrium states directly from unstructured meshes, enabling distributional accuracy even from short simulations. However, graph-based diffusion approaches suffer from hand-crafted architectural constraints, limited receptive fields in message passing, and costly multi-scale designs, which restrict scalability to larger and more complex domains. We propose Fluid-DiT, a Graph-Free Diffusion Transformer that replaces graph message passing with attention-based denoising, eliminating explicit graph design while preserving the ability to model distributions of chaotic flows. Our framework introduces a latent-space formulation that disentangles geometric fidelity from distributional learning, reducing high-frequency artifacts and accelerating sampling. By leveraging the transformer's global receptive field, Fluid-DiT naturally captures both local flow structures and long-range correlations without requiring hierarchical graph coarsening. On canonical benchmarks including laminar cylinder wakes, ellipse-flow systems, and turbulent 3D wing experiments, Fluid-DiT consistently outperforms graph-based diffusion baselines in both sample quality and distributional accuracy, achieving higher $R^2$ correlations and lower Wasserstein distances. Moreover, it generalizes robustly from short, incomplete trajectories to unseen Reynolds numbers and geometries, demonstrating strong scalability.

Rectified flows, also called flow matching or stochastic interpolants, are generative models that learn a time-dependent vector field steering a probability curve between two probability distributions, usually referred to as latent and target distributions. Reflow accelerates inference by iteratively straightening the trajectories induced by this vector field. We study the asymptotic behavior of this iteration and characterize its limit points. First, we define weak rectified couplings which always exist. Next, when rectified flow updates are alternated with minibatch optimal transport steps of fixed batch size, we show that any limit is $N$-cyclically monotone, where $N$ is the batch size. Such $N$-cyclically monotone couplings enjoy favorable structural and stability properties such as rectifiability and straightness. Finally, restricting velocities to gradient fields and assuming additional support conditions, we prove that reflow limits coincide with the optimal transport map between the endpoint distributions.

Long-horizon agents rely on memory to reuse experiences, yet existing memory systems often assume that evidence can be directly consumed through a fixed representation. This leads to representation mismatch, where relevant information is available but not organized for the current decision. To this end, we propose MemPrism, a task-conditioned relational memory framework that separates persistent experience storage from decision-time working memory. MemPrism records interactions as the event stream and dynamically constructs relational views according to the current task context. A lightweight view policy selects the relation structure, evidence range, outcome condition, and granularity, while a deterministic composer and render transform historical facts into a temporary optical working-memory view for a frozen task policy. Experiments on long-horizon embodied and web-agent benchmarks show that MemPrism consistently improves the task performance, especially as trajectories become longer, while reducing memory token consumption. Furthermore, the learned view policy transfers across different VLMs without additional adaptation, demonstrating the effectiveness of task-conditioned relational views as a general memory interface for agents.

Modern agent harnesses persist state across tasks and sessions through persistent carriers like memory, skills, tools, and shared artifacts. However, this capability creates delayed safety risks: attacker-influenced content can cross system boundaries and later affect the execution of a benign request. Existing benchmarks typically focus on a few carriers or harnesses, while end-to-end attack-success rates reveal little about how risks propagate. To this end, we present HarnessSafe, a benchmark comprising 328 executable cases across seven persistent-carrier families and evaluated on most mainstream agent harnesses. Each case is specified as a Persistent-Risk Lifecycle that traces attacker influence from its initial entry, through persistence across carriers and system boundaries, to a later benign trigger and an observable violation. We further introduce a multi-stage, trace-based evaluation that uses observable execution evidence to determine how far each attack chain progresses and where it is stopped. Experiments show that containment is carrier-specific and strongly depends on the harness-model configuration. Both the harness and model backend substantially shape containment outcomes, while attack success rates cannot reflect distinct lifecycle progression patterns.

Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) requires generating collision-free paths for large agent fleets under strict real-time constraints. Reactive frameworks such as PIBT and Enhanced PIBT (EPIBT) scale effortlessly to thousands of agents through rule-based, step-by-step coordination but suffer from severe temporal myopia, making them ineffective in scenarios where long-horizon reasoning is essential. RHCR plans windowed paths over multi-step horizons but incurs substantial planning overheads that hinder scalability. TP tackles both challenges by planning only subsets of agents at each timestep, yet its applicability is restricted to highly structured maps. To achieve long-horizon planning at scale across general maps, we propose Path Updates over Staggered Horizons (PUSH), a LMAPF planner capable of coordinating thousands of agents in under a second while planning over multi-step horizons. PUSH combines the key advantages of PIBT, RHCR, and TP. Like TP, PUSH reduces computational complexity by planning only a subset of agents at each timestep using staggered planning windows. Unlike TP, however, PUSH plans RHCR-style windowed paths in general maps without relying on restrictive map assumptions. To maintain high throughput in congested environments, PUSH further integrates EPIBT-inspired priority inheritance, backtracking, and anytime improvements into its windowed planning. Empirical evaluations across two realistic MAPF scenarios requiring long-horizon reasoning show that PUSH scales to the same massive agent loads as EPIBT (e.g., 10k agents) while achieving significantly higher system throughput than all baselines.

No single large language model (LLM) is optimal across all queries and budget constraints, making model routing essential for cost-effective deployment. Existing routers adopt diverse formulations and implementations, making fair comparison and extension difficult. We present a unified formulation of LLM routing as a sequential decision process characterized by five components: context encoders, model encoders, scoring functions, decision rules, and learning signals, covering single-turn, multi-turn, and personalized routing. Based on this formulation, we develop an automated pipeline for constructing routing supervision and evaluating routers jointly on response quality and inference cost. The resulting benchmark, xRouteBench, spans generic LLM, memory-augmented, vision, time-series, and personalized routing tasks. We further introduce LLMRouter, an open-source modular infrastructure with more than 16 representative routers. Our empirical study shows that learned routers outperform the strongest fixed-model baseline by 14.6% relatively, lightweight routers become more competitive under tight cost constraints, and user-conditioned routing consistently improves personalization.

Modern manufacturing imposes six coupled demands on adaptive control: local decisions with global consequences, partial observability, nonstationarity, reflex speed response with long horizon effects, delayed and diffuse outcomes, and dynamics that resist explicit modeling. Cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL), posed as a Dec-POMDP under centralized training with decentralized execution, is a particularly natural formalism for these demands. This paper adopts a MARL centered scope and asks where large language models (LLMs) should augment, interface with, train, or, in the strongest competitive case, replace that coordination core. A taxonomy organizes the literature through four LLM attachment points: policy, reward design, communication between agents, and hierarchical planning. A conditional capability profile separates native mechanism, reported performance, formal guarantee, and engineering maturity, and a deployment readiness analysis identifies the evidence behind each role. These stages yield the principal contribution: a three layer MARL centered reference architecture, grounded in evidence, for semantic reasoning, adaptive cooperative control, and independently assured execution. The LLM-Augmented Dec-POMDP is a descriptive comparative notation for that architecture, recording four attachment choices without introducing a new decision process class or algorithm. Under the reviewed evidence, conventional MARL is better suited to frequent, structured, decentralized coordination after task specific training, whereas LLM components are promising for semantic interpretation, reward drafting, human interaction, and slower supervisory planning. Current LLM only manufacturing controllers do not yet establish equivalence for strict real time, decentralized, safety critical control; this conclusion is bounded by the available evidence and does not assert impossibility.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong results in improving large language models (LLMs) on tasks with stationary, verifiable rewards, such as mathematical reasoning and code execution. In these settings, the environment follows fixed rules and does not adapt strategically to the agent. Strategic dialogue differs in this respect: the environment is another agent that adapts to the policy, and success depends on the interaction between the two sides. Despite this interactive nature, current RL approaches typically train a target agent against a fixed counterpart or simulator. We find that this training paradigm encourages the policy to exploit counterpart-specific regularities rather than learn strategies that generalize across counterparts. We call this problem the static-counterpart mismatch, which we quantify directly in our experiments. To address it, we propose Isolated Bilateral Reinforcement Learning (IB-RL), in which the two roles coevolve through joint rollouts while each role optimizes its own reward through fully independent advantages, action masks, and update paths. We evaluate frozen policies against fully independent held-out counterparts in both domains. On Vehicle TeleSales, IB-RL achieves 89.6% Success@1, compared to 84.6% for the best unilateral RL baseline. On Deal-or-NoDeal, it reaches 98.4% agreement against DeepSeek V4 Pro, compared to 86.4% for the best unilateral baseline. These results indicate that jointly training both roles with strict peragent isolation produces policies that generalize more effectively to unseen counterparts.

Complex systems, core objects of study in artificial life, model diverse phenomena through nonlinear, feedback-driven interactions that produce emergent behavior, with applications from population dynamics and biology to economic policy and strategic decision-making. Yet the difficulty of predicting how feedback structure gives rise to emergent behavior, a central open problem in artificial life, makes goal-directed design exceptionally challenging. In established practice, system structures are written in specialized modeling languages such as DYNAMO or STELLA, compounding the challenge with labor-intensive workflows that limit adoption and hinder timely decision-making. To address these challenges, we introduce CEDAR, an autonomous method that uses Large Language Model (LLM) agents to discover complex systems satisfying user-specified behavioral goals. Our key innovation is an LLM-driven Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) deeply coupled with complex systems: at each iteration, an LLM Judge evaluates emergent behavior against specified goals and an LLM Editor proposes improved variants, with the Judge acting as a fitness function and the Editor as a variation operator, akin to a generate-and-evaluate loop in evolutionary computation. We represent complex systems as a restricted, runnable subset of Python with domain-specific primitives, letting LLMs modify system dynamics directly. CEDAR formalizes this as an MCTS variant with an LLM-parameterized transition kernel and value function, enabling goal-directed discovery of complex system behaviors while preserving solution diversity, and its LLM-based interpretability reveals how structural changes drive emergent behavior. CEDAR reduces human effort while enabling capabilities difficult to achieve with existing approaches, facilitating broader adoption of complex systems across domains.