Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective way to strengthen the long-context reasoning of large language models (LLMs), but it needs training data that are long, diverse, challenging, and verifiable. Human annotation of such data is expensive, naturally occurring data are too scarce to sustain RL, and existing synthesis methods depend on external corpora or stronger teacher models, which become harder to obtain as the trained models get stronger. Recently, RL from zero data, in which a model learns from tasks it proposes itself, has achieved excellent performance, but existing methods target short-context tasks. Therefore, we propose $\textbf{LongZero}$, a method that lets an LLM improve its own long-context reasoning without any external data. Instead of writing questions and answers over existing documents, LongZero first has the model synthesize the question and answer with its supporting evidence in a compact structured form, and only then separately expands the evidence into a long multi-document context. LongZero combines these self-written multi-hop reasoning tasks with self-written multi-round retrieval tasks and trains the model with GRPO. We evaluate LongZero on two LLMs across five long-context reasoning benchmarks and compare it with RL on data synthesized from external corpora. Experimental results show that LongZero can generalize to real tasks, and outperforms both baselines, suggesting a viable and promising path to improving long-context reasoning of LLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30132
Language models' abilities to interpret tasks and generate programs offer a promising basis for 3D spatial reasoning. Yet following spatial instructions in 3D scenes requires programs to construct geometric references that language leaves implicit. In this work, we introduce VoxProg, which formulates 3D object placement through voxel programming: a language model translates task interpretations into executable programs over local voxel views of scene surfaces. Because these views index surface geometry on regular grids with explicit coordinates and neighborhood relations, an evidence program can isolate task-relevant regions and boundaries directly from scene meshes, and a downstream pose program can measure the resulting geometry to compute a target $SE(3)$ pose. Visual and numerical feedback from execution lets the model inspect intermediate selections and candidate placements to iteratively revise its code. To evaluate open-ended placement across functional use, geometric fit, and contextual arrangements, we introduce the 71-task VoxProg-Bench benchmark along with an evaluation suite pairing perceptual Intent Alignment and 3D Physical Validity. Across VoxProg-Bench and external benchmarks, VoxProg consistently outperforms relation-based, keypoint-based, and mesh-based baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30127
Quantitative research is an iterative loop: a researcher proposes a market hypothesis, implements it as an executable signal, tests it on historical data, and decides what to keep. Existing benchmarks score formulas, code, or individual trading decisions, leaving open whether large language models (LLMs) can complete this loop and produce strategies that work beyond the research period. We introduce Quant-Arena, a benchmark and public leaderboard for end-to-end quantitative research on real A-share market data. A model constructs features and stock-scoring code, receives feedback only on 2022--2023, and freezes one strategy for assessment on the sealed year 2024. A cash-account evaluator applies trading constraints and costs, including market impact estimated from a simulated order book. Scores are dominated by realized excess return and complemented by signal quality and the diversity of features used by the strategy. We evaluate nine frontier models, among which GPT-6 Astra scores highest; yet no model beats the equal-weight market in 2024. Quant-Arena is open to submissions from any model or agent harness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30113
Vietnamese pre-trained encoders have improved rapidly, but the strongest ones are large, multilingual-vocabulary models or depend on external word segmentation, which makes them costly to deploy. We present GoiBERT, a family of two compact Vietnamese encoders with 26M and 49M parameters that operate directly on raw text. GoiBERT learns from two complementary teachers. A same-tokenizer Vietnamese encoder first teaches general-purpose representations. A much larger teacher then provides task-level guidance through soft labels that are generated without ever labeling its own training data. Across eight benchmarks covering text classification, aspect-based sentiment analysis, natural language inference, and named entity recognition, GoiBERT-large achieves the highest average score among non-teacher models. It does so with fewer than half the parameters of the strongest compact baseline and twice its throughput. GoiBERT-base retains 99% of that baseline's performance at a quarter of its size. Our analysis shows that compression is nearly lossless for sentiment and classification tasks but remains costly for inference and entity recognition, which points to clear directions for future work. Our code and models are available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30067
Uniform diffusion language models (UDLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising sequences of ordinary vocabulary tokens, any of which may be corrupted and subsequently revised. During training, UDLMs must denoise from a context that may itself be unreliable, whereas masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) always condition on a clean context. This challenging training objective makes UDLMs more FLOP-intensive to train than MDLMs, but it yields stronger downstream reasoning performance. Recently, selective looping, which recursively applies a few early Transformer layers within each denoising step, has been shown to improve training efficiency in MDLMs under an iso-FLOP budget. We investigate looping in UDLMs while keeping the training objective and sampler unchanged. We find that looping significantly improves training efficiency: looped UDLMs reach the validation NLL of a non-looped UDLM trained on about 0.5 trillion tokens with up to 2.8x fewer training FLOPs on OpenWebText and 3.3x fewer on FineWeb-Edu. We also find that, at a matched NFE budget, looped UDLMs reach up to 9.8% lower generation perplexity than the non-looped UDLM, with most gains achieved at moderate loop counts. Finally, we study different loop-count distributions and find that sampling smaller loop counts more frequently during training improves inference efficiency: on downstream tasks, this strategy uses 12% fewer loops than uniform loop-count sampling without degrading accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30066
Robots must act under physical and social constraints while adapting to changes in their environment and human needs. Existing embodied-agent systems often focus on specified goals or abstract execution into symbolic actions, limiting evaluation in an evolving world. We introduce TARSphere, a robot-oriented full-stack framework for physically and socially grounded long-horizon embodied agents. TARSphere-Infra runs robot policies in a physics simulator with embodied NPCs and constrained dialogue. An event-driven finite-state machine (FSM) uses completed actions and delivered information to update task states and evaluate outcomes. TARSphere-Harness, its embodied brain harness, lets a frozen multimodal large language model (MLLM) act through multi-level executable skills, using observations, hierarchical memory, and execution feedback to revise its decisions. On this foundation, agent-in-the-loop curation aligns task semantics, causal dependencies, and scene geometry to construct TARSphere-Bench: 360 episodes across 30 indoor scenes. Five paired conditions assess perceptual robustness, disruption adaptation, task update, human coordination, and intent understanding for navigate-and-report and fetch-and-deliver tasks. Our evaluation of 8 MLLMs shows that general-purpose models can outperform embodied models, while task updates and human interaction remain difficult. Frequent collisions and falls further motivate evaluating execution safety alongside task success, even with a shared action interface and decision budget.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30043
Given the enormous number of claims to be checked, verifiable legal AI requires scalable, cost-effective models that answer the practical needs of law. System One decision models are built on large language models but, instead of generating text, return a calibrated probability for each option. This suits the verification of legal authority, where the question is closed: a given holding, or none of them. We test whether such models abstain when the correct authority is missing. We extend CaseHOLD with an abstention condition in which the correct holding is replaced in 1,670 of 5,314 items, and compare four decision models with six generative LLMs. When no option is correct, generative LLMs still pick one in 38-86% of items; the most cautious decision model does so in 30%. On standard CaseHOLD, a decision model matches the best generative LLM (88.1% vs. 88.2%) at 1/55 of the cost. Accepting that LLM's answer only when a decision model agrees halves its wrong citations, and distilling a decision model's probabilities into Qwen3-8B, without labels, yields a well-calibrated local model. Legal AI should be judged by its wrong citations, not by accuracy alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29961
Forming an accurate theory-of-mind (ToM) is key to successful multi-agent collaboration and requires reasoning under uncertainty to capture multiple possible partner states. This is hard to do in the text representation space native to large language model (LLM) agents, which more easily describe a single partner state. To address this challenge, we introduce ToM2Vec, which learns to form abstract theories-of-mind in a rich latent space via a fixed budget of continuous reasoning tokens. During training, supervision for these tokens comes from the partner's actual thoughts, which the ToM tokens are trained to abstract and match. At test-time, ToM tokens are generated by each agent and act as conditioners for that agent's thoughts and actions. Across several environments covering collaborative, competitive, and mixed-motive settings (Overcooked-AI, multiparty negotiation, Decrypto, Hanabi, and Collab Escape/Capture), we evaluate ToM2Vec's ability to support multi-agent interactions and collaboration, finding consistent improvements over the base model and a variety of competitive trained and prompted baselines. We show that latent reasoning is critical, with performance dropping when reasoning is expressed in text. Moreover, we show that ToM2Vec training generalizes to partner model families not seen at train-time, including a proprietary model (GPT-5.4). In our analysis, we provide evidence that the latent tokens encode a ToM, rather than task-specific information: ToM2Vec's tokens improve the agent's ability to directly answer questions about partner beliefs, desires, and next actions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29934
Thermal cameras can watch over older people living alone without capturing faces, and multimodal large language models (LLMs) can judge a short video without task-specific training. We evaluate a production multimodal LLM, Gemini 3.8 Flash at temperature 0, as the decision stage of an event-triggered fall screener, used exactly as a deployed prototype uses it: one request per short thermal clip, with its sound track when there is one, and its predecessor Gemini 3.7 Flash on the same requests. On 438 staged falls and 563 non-fall windows that we located by hand in a public 32x24 thermal dataset, the deployed request called 69% of the held-out subjects' falls (67% over all subjects; bed falls excluded) and none of 499 non-fall windows, including people lying on the floor and getting up. Over 76 h of ordinary life in an occupied room, recorded at 160x120 with sound, it called none of 395 clips a fall (95% upper bound 1.2 false alarms per day) and caught 4 of the 9 staged falls the camera could see. One cautionary sentence in the prompt ("a person who goes out of view ... is not a fall") accounted for many of the misses: removing it raised sensitivity on the held-out subjects from 69% to 83% on 3.8 Flash and from 80% to 92% on Gemini 3.7 Flash, and in the home from 4 to 9 of the 9 visible falls, with no false call in ordinary living but at the price of calling deliberate lie-downs a fall. Sensitivity collapsed at 8x6 pixels (34%); identical requests disagreed on 4% of windows; and when the model called a fall, its explanation placed it within a second of the annotated landing 99% of the time. Two conventional detectors trained on the laboratory data caught nearly every held-out laboratory fall but raised 14.2 and 23.9 false alarms per day in the home. We release the frame-level fall annotations of the public dataset and every model answer on it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29913
Code-switching is a natural linguistic phenomenon, yet its impact on high-level reasoning tasks remains largely unexplored in under-resourced languages like Romanian. Natural language processing tasks, such as satire detection, rely heavily on nuanced cultural and syntactic cues that large language models struggle to capture. In this paper, we investigate four methods (i.e., random replacement, phrase translation, dependency parsing, and large language models) for generating synthetic code-mixed Romanian sentences with English, German, French, and Italian. We start with an existing dataset for satire detection, compiled from Romanian news articles and annotated at the sentence level by humans, and augment it with over 600k samples, namely CS-SeLeRoSa. We provide an in-depth analysis of the dataset generation process. Then, we evaluate several multilingual large language models across zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and fine-tuning regimes on both the synthetic corpus and a human-adjudicated gold benchmark, namely CS-SeLeRoSa-Gold. While older open models suffer substantial degradation (dropping to 37%-55% macro-F1), newer models like Gemma 4 31B achieve 68.1% zero-shot, rivaling frontier models like GPT-5 mini (69.5%). Furthermore, fine-tuning significantly reduces formatting errors and improves the results, increasing Gemma 4 31B to 77.5% on CS-SeLeRoSa and 72.6% on the gold standard, outperforming frontier zero-shot baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29907
Automated radiology report generation for multi-sequence brain MRI holds strong promise for alleviating radiologists' workload, yet it remains a demanding problem: brain MRI studies are inherently volumetric, each pulse sequence carries complementary diagnostic information, and annotated data are critically scarce for low-resource clinical languages. Existing brain MRI-report resources are still dominated by English reports, translated clinical text, or datasets adapted from task-specific imaging benchmarks, leaving routine low-resource clinical reporting and heterogeneous multi-sequence MRI protocols insufficiently represented. To bridge this gap, we introduce ViBMR, to the best of our knowledge, the first large-scale multi-sequence brain MRI dataset paired with routine Vietnamese clinical reports, comprising 3,649 patients and 11,875 MRI series across T1, T2, FLAIR, and contrast-enhanced T1 sequences. Building on ViBMR, we establish a comprehensive evaluation setup for brain MRI report generation, covering representative medical vision-language models, multi-sequence inputs, and feature aggregation strategies. The results provide key insights into dataset characteristics and model behavior, while demonstrating the necessity of native low-resource clinical datasets for reliable Vietnamese-origin brain MRI report generation. Our dataset and baseline models will be released for non-commercial research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29905
Existing social bias benchmarks evaluate large language models mostly on fluent, well-formed English, reflecting native speaker usage and leaving non-native writers unrepresented. To address this gap, we investigate how grammatical errors by non-native writers affect social bias. We develop a controlled framework that injects common learner errors into prompts and apply it to three bias benchmarks covering stereotype alignment and demographic preference across gender, race, and religion. We find that grammatical errors increase bias, and the effect grows with the error rate. Among the four common error types we consider, preposition errors produce the largest and most consistent increase in stereotype alignment. Our analysis suggests that errors increase bias when they are more likely to interfere with comprehension. Finally, fine-tuning on erroneous texts reduces the bias increase caused by grammatical errors. Our findings show that bias evaluations based exclusively on well-formed prompts may underestimate the bias experienced by users whose English contains grammatical errors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29896
Text processing is crucial for low-resource languages as it enables the development of tools and technologies that bridge the digital divide and provide equitable access to information and services. By empowering low-resource languages with robust text processing, we can preserve linguistic diversity, enhance education, improve communi- cation, and foster inclusivity in a rapidly digitizing world. Due to the lack of sufficient annotated datasets and lin- guistic resources, it is challenging to develop accurate and reliable language technologies for these low-resource languages. Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted sig- nificant attention with their performance and the value they produce. However, with the ever-evolving language, adapting LLMs for a specific task is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Thus, Retrieval-Augmented Genera- tion (RAG) has overcome this limitation by augmenting LLMs with external knowledge, thereby improving their efficiency and extensive task-specific adaptation. Most applications of the RAG technique have been limited to English and has seen limited application in In- dic languages. This paper introduces the RAG-powered AI-Tutor application, Acharya 2.0, designed to produce academic assistance to Hindi-speaking students. The client-server-based web application integrates many fea- tures to support students in accessing and interacting with educational content.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25192
Large language models are typically trained with next-token prediction (NTP), which rewards predicting specific tokens rather than explicitly accounting for the semantic similarities between different words or expressions. Prior work has addressed this limitation by augmenting training data with minimally varying sentences that replace a target word with conceptually related alternatives, e.g., "The tired coach ran home" $\rightarrow$ {"The tired trainer ran home", "The tired instructor ran home", ...}. Such concept augmentation improves performance, but it remains unclear whether its effectiveness depends on where in the sentence the concept is expressed. We reproduce and extend prior work $\textit{beyond nouns}$ to verbs and adjectives, asking whether the part of speech (POS) carrying the concept signal affects perplexity and downstream performance. We find different patterns across evaluation settings: concept augmentation improves perplexity most consistently on news, independent of the POS used, whereas verbs provide the most reliable downstream gains. Despite these behavioral differences, representational analyses using CKA and linear probing show that the conditions yielding the largest downstream gains are not necessarily those that most alter the model's internal representations. Together, these results suggest that the effectiveness of concept augmentation depends on where and how conceptual information is introduced during training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29843
Translating structured biomedical information into accurate, patient-friendly narratives remains a challenging biomedical data-to-text (D2T) task. While small language models (SLMs) are attractive for healthcare applications because of their lower computational cost, easier deployment, and improved data governance, the impact of post-training alignment on biomedical D2T generation has not been systematically studied. In this work, we compare four alignment methods: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), direct preference optimization (DPO), odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), and group relative policy optimization (GRPO), using Qwen-2.5 models for medication leaflet generation. We further introduce FDALeaflets, a dataset derived from OpenFDA drug labels, to evaluate cross-regulatory generalization in a zero-shot setting. Selected aligned SLMs outperform GPT-5 on several reference-based metrics, whereas GPT-5 achieves better hallucination and adequacy scores on FDALeaflets under LLM-as-judge evaluation. Among RL-free alignment methods, ORPO achieves the best in-domain semantic performance, reaching a semantic textual similarity (STS) score of 0.9752. GRPO achieves the highest FDALeaflets STS (0.9407), exceeding GPT-5 (0.9295). These findings show that post-training alignment is a key factor in improving both semantic fidelity and generalization for biomedical D2T generation, while clinical safety and patient readability require human verification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13430
Evaluating audio-text semantic alignment is important in various audio-language tasks. Existing methods mainly quantify audio-text semantic alignment using a single score and cannot explicitly describe how audio and text differ. In this paper, we propose audio-text difference captioning, a task that generates textual descriptions of differences between audio and text. We also construct a new dataset AT-DIFFER containing audio-text pairs with systematically simulated differences and corresponding difference captions. Using AT-DIFFER, we fine-tune an existing multimodal large language model to describe differences between audio and text. The experimental results show that the original model has limited ability to describe such differences, whereas fine-tuning on AT-DIFFER substantially improves this ability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29836
Calibrating large language models (LLMs) in open-ended generation is uniquely challenging because many distinct token sequences can express the same underlying meaning. Prior calibration techniques target either fixed-set classification confidence or the binary correctness of individual strings, making them inherently ill-suited for the dynamic, multi-string nature of open-ended semantic outcomes. To bridge this gap, we introduce S-EDL, a novel evidential method that natively optimizes LLMs for semantic calibration. By eliciting evidence from the sequence likelihoods of the model itself, S-EDL constructs a differentiable Dirichlet prior over prompt-specific semantic classes. Optimizing the evidential loss under this prior yields a calibration-aware training signal over variable semantic classes, completely bypassing the need for fixed multiple-choice options. Evaluations across four open-ended benchmarks and three models demonstrate that S-EDL substantially reduces semantic calibration error while improving accuracy. By aligning generative likelihoods with semantic correctness, this work establishes a framework for deploying trustworthy LLMs in complex, open-ended applications. Code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29832
Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel combinations of previously observed objects and attributes. Prior work showed that large-scale vision-language models encode decomposable semantic structures that can be recomposed to enable generalization. The Geodesically Decomposable Embeddings (GDE) framework formalizes this by identifying directions in the tangent space at the Frechet mean of the embedding distribution, which encode primitive visual concepts. Unseen attribute-object compositions can be synthesized through vector addition of these primitives. We revisit the assumption that compositional generalization requires explicit attribute-object pair re-composition. By means of new compositional scoring functions and extensive evaluations, we show that directly using the decomposed primitives suffices for recognizing unseen compositions. In that, we gain insights on how the geometry of the embedding manifold (Euclidean, spherical, or hyperbolic) and dataset structure affect compositional reasoning. Across models (CLIP, DINOv2, MERU, HyCoCLIP), we show that compositional structure consistently emerges as primitive representations, enabling inference on CZSL benchmarks (MIT-States, VAW-CZSL, UT-Zappos50K, Clothing16K) and group robustness on Waterbirds and CelebA. Code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29811
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving external knowledge. Recently, some RAG methods interleave reasoning and retrieval, enabling LLMs to progressively generate sub-queries and retrieve external knowledge. However, these methods may suffer from redundant or ineffective sub-queries and insufficiently diverse query exploration. Moreover, due to the tightly interleaved nature of reasoning and retrieval, it remains unclear how the evolving reasoning process influences query intent. To characterize the evolution of query intent during reasoning, we introduce search momentum, which captures the accumulated retrieval tendency induced by historical changes in generated sub-queries along the reasoning trajectory. Through momentum-based analysis, we find that the query generation process tends to continuously evolve along existing retrieval trajectories. Based on this observation, we propose MAPS, a Macro-Adaptive Parallel Reasoning framework for regulating search momentum and mitigating query-intent drift. MAPS first retains the retrieved knowledge and a refined reasoning state, thereby reducing the influence of historical reasoning trajectories on subsequent sub-query generation. Subsequently, MAPS extends the conventional sequential reasoning process into a parallel reasoning paradigm. At each iteration, MAPS identifies complementary retrieval directions, generates corresponding sub-queries for parallel retrieval, and consolidates the retrieved evidence to update the knowledge and reasoning states. Experiments on six question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that MAPS consistently outperforms representative RAG methods across different backbone models. All code and resources are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29792
Asked what to study, which career to pursue, or what product to build, large language models (LLMs) often recommend AI-related options. We ask where this tendency comes from by comparing models before and after fine-tuning and by varying how questions are asked. First, pretrained models already include explicit AI/ML terms in the recommendations of 27% of their responses, and their released instruction-tuned versions do so in 59%. Second, fine-tuning models ourselves shows that this rise is not inevitable: general instruction tuning leaves the rate unchanged, but removing the 7% of instruction examples that concern AI cuts it by 14 percentage points, below the level of the pretrained models it starts from. Data rewarding helpfulness raise it by 9 points, while data ranked by the preferences of diverse simulated users lower it by 9. Finally, with models held fixed, asking for the "best" option or for what to do "right now" raises the rate by 8 and 18 points, whereas telling the model it is an AI advisor adds 4. Overall, the tendency starts in pretraining, and what models learn afterward, together with how a question is phrased, decides how strongly it appears.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29785