The rapid development of large language models and multimodal large language models has accelerated the emergence of proactive agents capable of operating everyday tools and assisting users in real-world environments. However, existing benchmarks struggle to evaluate such agents effectively, as they often rely on sandboxed environments and single-turn evaluation paradigms. Moreover, their scenario-based task taxonomies mix multiple model capabilities within the same task category, making it difficult to identify the root causes of agent failures. To address these limitations, we introduce UniClawBench, the first capability-driven benchmark designed to evaluate proactive agents in dynamic, real-world settings. UniClawBench is built around five foundational model capabilities: Skill Usage, Exploration, Long-Context Reasoning, Multimodal Understanding, and Cross-Platform Coordination. Based on these capabilities, we design 400 bilingual real-world tasks. Unlike previous benchmarks that rely on static, pre-recorded answers, our benchmark evaluates agents in live Docker containers using fine-grained, step-by-step completion checkpoints. Furthermore, we design a closed-loop evaluation strategy comprising an executor agent, a hidden supervisor agent, and a user agent to simulate realistic multi-turn human feedback without leaking grading criteria. To disentangle base model capabilities from framework-level design choices, we evaluate state-of-the-art models under multiple agent frameworks. Through comprehensive comparisons across both models and frameworks, we show how base model capabilities and agent framework designs jointly shape performance in real-world environments. To facilitate future research, we make our benchmark and code publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08768
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models, Large Language Models, and Multimodal Large Language Models have improved autonomous driving tasks such as scene understanding, decision making, trajectory prediction, and visual question answering. However, evaluating whether these models can reliably reason about safety-critical incidents remains challenging. To address this gap, we present AUTOPILOT-VQA, an incident-centric visual question answering benchmark for dashcam video understanding. The dataset evaluates different systems through structured questions designed around real-world driving incidents and near-incidents. The benchmark covers diverse safety-relevant categories, including weather and lighting conditions, traffic environment, road layout, road surface state, signage, involved entities, accident occurrence, impact location, and avoidability-related reasoning. By requiring models to answer grounded questions about both contextual scene properties and event-level incident details, AUTOPILOT-VQA moves beyond object recognition toward temporally grounded, safety-aware reasoning. The dataset is released as part of the AUTOPILOT CVPR 2026 competition and provides a standardized benchmark for assessing the reliability of autonomous driving systems in different scenarios. Our benchmark support developments for more interpretable, robust, and safety-conscious vision-language systems for real-world autonomous driving.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08745
Large language model (LLM) applications increasingly use explicit workflows for tool use, retrieval, branching, checkpointing, and human approval. Existing workflow systems already address many execution concerns. This paper proposes a Lisp-inspired but language-independent conceptual model: symbolic forms, object identity, and live-image thinking are used as explanatory lenses, not implementation commitments. In this model, workflow definitions, workflow instances, inference records, context snapshots, and dependency relations are represented as persistent knowledge objects in a shared knowledge substrate. Its central semantic distinction is between derive and infer: derive is deterministic computation over available state; infer is mediated LLM judgment under declared context and executor-controlled capability policy. The result is a preliminary conceptual account of semantic persistence: workflows do not merely produce knowledge and leave traces, but can themselves be represented as inspectable, resumable, and reviewable knowledge objects, while formal transition semantics remain future work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08740
Post-training quantization is widely used to deploy large language models in resource-constrained settings, yet its evaluation relies almost exclusively on accuracy and perplexity. We show that these metrics fail to capture behavioral changes induced by quantization. We introduce correctness agreement, a decision-level metric that measures overlap in correct predictions between a base model and its quantized variants, independent of absolute accuracy. Across multiple models and quantization schemes from 8-bit to 2-bit, we find that behavioral divergence emerges under moderate quantization even when task performance appears preserved. To explain this effect, we analyze quantization as a structural operator on attention weights and quantify layer-wise distortions using statistical and distributional measures. Our results reveal non-linear breakpoints at low bit-widths and show that query and key projections are consistently more sensitive than value and output projections. These findings expose an illusion of equivalence between base and quantized models and motivate behavioral evaluation beyond conventional performance metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08734
A national language model offers a linguistic community its own instrument for measuring what its citizens say and value. Portugal's AMALIA, a publicly funded 9B-parameter model for European Portuguese, appears competitive on agreement alone: asked to code the moral foundation of authority, it agrees with trained human coders to within six F1 points of open models eight to thirteen times its size. Yet agreement is reliability, not validity. For theoretical constructs that must be inferred rather than read from surface features, the question is whether the model follows the construct's theory or reaches the right code by correlated shortcuts. We test this with the recovery gap: the loss in performance when a holistic prompt is decomposed into the codebook's atomic clauses and recombined by the theory's explicit rule. If calibration closes that gap, some portability should survive across models and languages; where it does not, the construct-model instrument is the likely locus of failure. We ask whether a calibrated English instrument transfers to AMALIA-9B and to European Portuguese. For one construct and one corpus, it does not. Decomposition recovers only about half of AMALIA's holistic performance, and error analysis suggests reliance on surface correlates, especially moral outrage near authority figures. An open multilingual LLM closes the gap on the same Portuguese corpus under the same instructions, pointing away from the corpus as the main explanation. AMALIA can still screen and pre-code at scale, but it cannot yet measure this construct well enough to stand alone. The study is a single counterexample, not a verdict on national models; it argues that sovereign-LLM benchmark batteries should test not only agreement with human coders, but the evidential route by which that agreement is warranted.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08731
Human decision-making is highly flexible -- some actions are taken immediately; others require longer deliberation. Language models have exhibited a similar capacity for adaptive "reasoning." However, transferring this capability to continuous control policies has been challenging, as directly reasoning in language space may lack the granularity for spatial understanding and precise motions. In this work, we show that reasoning for control policies can emerge by organizing information in an autoregressive latent space reminiscent of a memory palace, where retrieval is iterative and adaptive. Our method, Latent Memory Palace (LMP), formulates reasoning as variational inference with an autoregressive latent distribution. We derive a latent-space reinforcement learning technique to tractably optimize its variational lower bound. The resulting policy, LMP-$\pi$, achieves strong empirical performance in simulation and real-world domains while exhibiting interpretable, adaptive allocation of test-time compute. We further show that the same framework yields a variable-length action tokenizer, LMP-$\texttt{tok}$, which significantly improves the performance of downstream autoregressive policies. Together, these results present a new perspective on latent reasoning for control through the lens of variational inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08724
Speculative decoding accelerates sampling from an autoregressive LLM by using a faster auxiliary model to draft tokens which are then verified in parallel by the LLM. Standard speculative decoding is lossless: its rejection and resampling steps exactly preserve the LLM's sampling distribution. Recent work argues that relaxing this strict guarantee can yield further speed-ups, controlled capability-speed trade-offs, or even capability gains. We practically investigate training-free relaxed speculative decoding techniques, unify existing approaches within a shared framework, benchmark them on contemporary settings, and distil takeaways and empirical findings for practitioners. Important takeaways include: relaxation can require considerable capability evaluation unlike lossless speculative decoding, and many relaxed approaches rely on a drafter that is a good language model, making them unsuited for lightweight dedicated multi-token-prediction drafters.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08690
Large language model (LLM)-based web search agents are transforming information seeking from simple factoid question answering into complex, deep-and-wide search and research-oriented tasks. A single ReAct-style agent is constrained by one long trajectory and limited context, making it difficult to handle depth and coverage simultaneously. Existing multi-agent systems improve search coverage through parallel execution and aggregation, but still exhibit clear limitations in recursive depth, collaboration adaptability, and evidence-grounded expansion. We propose WebSwarm, a progressive recursive delegation framework that jointly constructs task decomposition, recursive expansion, and agent collaboration during inference. WebSwarm dynamically instantiates agentic search nodes, each coupling a local objective with a search mode that specifies how the node should organize search and collaboration. Each node can either solve its objective itself or further delegate child nodes; after solving, it returns evidence and results upward, enabling parent nodes to further expand, revise, or aggregate the search process. To guide this process, WebSwarm first probes how task-relevant information is organized on the web to ground subsequent node expansion, and reuses process-level experience across homogeneous sibling nodes. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus, WideSearch, DeepWideSearch, and GISA show that WebSwarm consistently outperforms single-agent and multi-agent baselines on deep, wide, and interleaved deep-and-wide tasks. Further analyses of ablation, task difficulty, web tool efficiency, and model generalization explain WebSwarm's effectiveness and provide insights for multi-agent search systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08662
As available training data approaches its physical limit, gains from Scaling Laws have begun to diminish. Consequently, improving Large Language Models (LLMs) now depends less on data expansion and more on higher-quality data utilization. However, in the context of large-scale corpora, existing refinement methodologies face significant limitations in quality, efficiency, and reliability: Rule-based approaches are constrained by fixed heuristics and struggle with instance-level variations; LLM-based approaches improve quality but fail to meet the efficiency and reliability requirements of large-scale data processing. To address these challenges, we propose UltraX, a function-calling refinement framework for large-scale pre-training data that completes the editing function space by introducing insertion in addition to deletion and modification, enabling fine-grained instance-level editing. Specifically, UltraX builds a reliable program-supervision generation pipeline. In this pipeline, dataset-adaptive prompt optimization first guides an expert LLM to produce high-quality end-to-end refined texts, and Line Alignment Mapping and Dynamic Context Replacement then convert original-refined text pairs into structured program supervision. Meanwhile, UltraX improves supervision quality and stabilizes the training distribution with low-confidence example filtering and ratio-controlled sampling by operation combination. During inference and execution, it normalizes and validates model outputs through sliding-window prediction, global operation aggregation, and systematic post-processing, improving the stability and reliability of large-scale execution. Experiments show that UltraX achieves the highest average performance across all corpora and also matches or surpasses baselines with fewer training tokens, demonstrating stronger data efficiency and refinement reliability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08646
Consumer-facing health chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for symptom assessment. However, chatbot development and evaluation often rely on cooperative, articulate, simulated patients. We analysed 2,053 real patient-chatbot conversations and found that communication patterns and expression of emotions vary widely across users. We developed a patient simulator that separately models clinical content, emotional state, conversational strategy, and communication style. In a Turing-inspired evaluation of realism with 15 human graders, simulated conversations were nearly indistinguishable from real ones, with human graders achieving an accuracy of 55%. We used five distinct patient personae, across 1,164 clinician-graded cases, to evaluate the performance of four LLMs in urgency assessment. We found that communication style can significantly alter triage outcomes. Patient-centred conversational artificial intelligence must accommodate communication diversity: systems designed for idealised, rather than realistic, interactions risk underperforming and amplifying health disparities when deployed in the real world.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08625
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for mechanistic interpretability by learning a set of sparse latent features in large models, each of which encodes a distinct concept. However, in vision-language models (VLMs), vanilla SAEs struggle to learn modality-consistent concepts, with concepts often exhibiting fragmented coverage (i.e., disjoint regions) in the visual modality. To address this challenge, we propose a Structured Sparse AutoEncoder ($S^2AE$) that enforces concept consistency from both semantic and spatial perspectives in the visual modality. Specifically, we group image patches based on Transformer attention similarity and spatial proximity, and introduce a structured sparsity regularization when training the vanilla SAE. The regularization consists of exclusive sparsity for inter-group concept disentanglement and group sparsity for intra-group concept consistency, which drives the latent neurons by SAEs to specialize in distinct, semantically grounded concepts. Evaluated on the \texttt{Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct} model, the method achieves 6.06% average improvement in semantic alignment (mIoU) and 60.81 in representational efficiency (lower l0 norm) while maintaining near-perfect reconstruction fidelity with an Explained Variance above 99%. Cross-modal analysis further demonstrates that $S^2AE$ enhances neuronal monosemanticity by this visual structural prior, achieving a 3.08% average gain in semantic consistency and a 2.37% average gain in monosemanticity scores for both modalities of multimodal features, thereby fostering more coherent and disentangled representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08605
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common malignancy and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Current guidelines and staging systems provide coarse categories, but often miss within-stage heterogeneity and the clinical context in electronic medical records (EMRs). We present HCC-STAR (Hepatocellular Carcinoma Staging, Treatment And pRognosis), a clinically aligned large language model that reads routine EMR narratives and jointly outputs risk score-based staging, ranked guideline-consistent treatments with evidence-based rationales, and individualized survival estimates. We curated about 30,000 HCC cases from SEER and expanded them into EMR-style narrative training data using a clinician-validated, prompt-based augmentation workflow. On this corpus, we developed a knowledge-aligned reasoning framework optimized with a step-verifiable composite reward, moving beyond text-level memorization of clinical guidelines. In a multi-center cohort of 6,668 patients from 12 hospitals in China, HCC-STAR achieved state-of-the-art performance in treatment recommendation and risk stratification compared with clinical guidelines and competitive models, including GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5 Pro. Hypothetical overall-survival analysis showed a median survival of 51 months under adherence to HCC-STAR recommendations, compared with 29 and 32 months under BCLC and CNLC. In clinician-centric evaluations, blinded hepatobiliary specialists rated HCC-STAR's reasoning and evidence-based justifications as trustworthy. The model surpassed resident and attending physicians in treatment accuracy and helped physicians make more accurate decisions faster when used as an assistant. These findings support HCC-STAR as a reliable and verifiable decision-support system for risk stratification and precision therapy in HCC.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08602
Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models achieve remarkable inference efficiency by activating only a small fraction of parameters per token, yet their full expert banks reside in memory at all times, creating a prohibitive deployment bottleneck. Existing structured pruning methods, largely designed for dense transformers, assess expert importance using locally derived heuristics that are blind to the interdependent nature of MoE routing. We introduce MAESTRO (Markov-chain Approximated Expert Sparsification via Transition-based ROuting), a structured pruning framework designed for MoE architectures that models autoregressive expert activation trajectories as Ergodic Markov chains whose stationary distributions encode cross-layer dependencies, yielding a globally aware importance heuristic. Evaluated across five diverse domains including Safety, Bias, and Ethics, MAESTRO outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 10.61% in average performance retention under a strict 50% compression regime, while exhibiting substantially lower cross-task variance, indicating that global, routing-congruent pruning produces models that generalize more consistently across heterogeneous tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08601
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often follow a fixed Think-then-Answer paradigm, which is inefficient in heterogeneous multitask settings because simple inputs may not require explicit reasoning while difficult ones can benefit substantially from it. Learning when to think is also unstable during post-training, where imbalanced rollouts can drive the model toward always-thinking or always-direct behavior. We propose Switch-Reasoner, a GRPO-based framework that learns to adaptively select reasoning modes for MLLMs. It treats thinking as a virtual tool invocation and allows the model to either answer directly or invoke explicit reasoning before answering. To stabilize this decision, we introduce a dual-level regulation mechanism that balances the overall use of Thinking Mode and Direct Mode while providing sample-level supervision based on the relative benefit of the two choices. Experiments on 11 multimodal tasks show that Switch-Reasoner reduces unnecessary reasoning while maintaining strong performance, achieving a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08572
Leveraging large language models (LLMs) to analyze complex documents -- such as academic papers, technical manuals, and financial reports -- has emerged as a mainstream and critical task in both research and industry. In practice, users must first filter relevant documents from large collections and then conduct in-depth analysis (e.g. question answering) over the selected subset, yet existing systems flatten documents into plain-text chunks, discarding the rich hierarchical structures (sections, tables, figures, equations) and degrading downstream performance. We present DocMaster, a hierarchical structure-aware document analysis system. DocMaster parses documents into hierarchical document trees preserving original layouts and constructs a structure-aware semantic index that enables accurate document filtering and in-depth analysis. We demonstrate DocMaster through an interactive web interface that enables users to upload document collections, construct tree-based and multi-view semantic indices, filter relevant documents via natural-language conditions, and perform follow-up question answering over the filtered results. The source code, data, and demo are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08539
Hand-object interaction (HOI) recognition requires capturing both hand manipulations and object transformations. However, existing video-language models often fall into shortcuts by relying on spurious correlations among hands, objects, or environmental context, rather than reasoning from the appearance and dynamics of hands and objects themselves. To address this limitation, we propose a new learning paradigm that combines (i) hand-object masked training, which enables robust reasoning from partial hand or object observations, and (ii) an HOI-dynamics-aware decoder that explicitly learns hand- and object-centric embeddings through auxiliary predictions of their locations and semantics, enhancing sensitivity to both cues. To systematically evaluate such cue-specific reasoning, we introduce Cue-Isolated HOI (CI-HOI), a new evaluation that assesses models' ability to predict actions from hand- and object-related cues independently. To enable CI-HOI, we curate the DEHOI testbed, which separates hand- and object-related observations for disentangled HOI evaluation through inpainting. Using DEHOI, we demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that our training strategy exploits hand- and object-centric information more effectively than existing models. Our approach improves over existing models on DEHOI, standard action recognition, object state recognition, and even robot manipulation action recognition, leading to more robust HOI understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08514
Vision-language models excel at video captioning, yet typically generate descriptions that fail to capture individual viewers' attention. We propose VEGAS (Video caption Evaluation via GAze Score), a training-free metric that leverages test-time gaze to sample personalized, attention-aligned text. It is a cross-modal, information-theoretic metric that quantifies how well a candidate caption matches a viewer's focus. To evaluate VEGAS, we curate a dataset of egocentric activities and instructional slides paired with synchronized gaze and reference annotations. We then select captions based on VEGAS via rejection sampling without model retraining. Experiments show that VEGAS-selected captions align significantly better with human focus and improve downstream caption-to-video retrieval, demonstrating the practical utility of incorporating viewer attention during inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08489
The rapid integration of Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) into critical infrastructure promises to revolutionize personalized healthcare and dietary management. However, in the domain of food systems, autonomous agents face a unique and persistent challenge: the "Systemic Information Asymmetry" between visual appearance and intrinsic nutritional composition. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on coarse-grained classification tasks, such as food category recognition, which fail to evaluate the intricate reasoning chain required for real-world dietary management -- specifically, the ability to traverse from identifying hidden ingredients to estimating physical mass, and finally synthesizing safety-critical medical advice. In this paper, we introduce OmniFood-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from the MM-Food-100K dataset. Unlike previous works, OmniFood-Bench evaluates VLMs across three progressive capabilities: Basic Perception (Ingredients & Cooking Methods), Quantitative Reasoning (Portion Size & Nutritional Profiling), and Safety-Critical Advisory (Disease-Specific Recommendations). We evaluate six state-of-the-art VLMs, including gpt-5.1, gemini-3-flash, and qwen3-vl-8B. Our extensive experiments reveal a startling "Semantic-Physical Gap": while models achieve near-human accuracy in naming dishes, they exhibit catastrophic failure in mass estimation and frequently hallucinate benign advice for high-risk diabetic profiles. This work establishes a rigorous standard for trustworthiness in autonomous agents deployed for public health. The code and datasets are available in: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08423
Current computational approaches for drug design typically focus on generating molecules conditioned on specific targets or general molecular properties, often neglecting the influence of disease context on target behavior and therapeutic outcomes. To address this gap, we introduce DrugGen-2, a novel generative model that designs small molecules conditioned on both disease ontology and target protein sequences. DrugGen-2 was developed by fine-tuning a pre-trained GPT-2 model on a curated dataset of approved drugs linked to their diseases and targets, using a two-step strategy of supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning via group relative policy optimization (GRPO). This process was guided by reward functions optimizing for chemical validity, novelty, diversity, and high predicted binding affinity. When evaluated on five protein targets relevant to diabetic nephropathy, DrugGen-2 significantly outperformed baseline models (DrugGPT and DrugGen). It demonstrated a superior capacity to generate unique molecules, exhibited greater structural similarity to approved drugs, and achieved improved predicted binding affinities across all targets. Molecular docking analyses further supported these findings, identifying candidate ligands with strong binding potential, including compounds with predicted affinities (-9.917, -9.485, and -9.367) exceeding those of reference drugs such as enalapril for angiotensin-converting enzyme (-8.283). By integrating disease-specific context into molecular generation, DrugGen-2 advances AI-assisted drug discovery, offering a powerful tool for de novo design and drug repurposing that accounts for the complex interplay between diseases and molecular targets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08404
The application of lightweight Large Language Models in rule-based scientific domains remains severely limited by their tendency to mimic linguistic patterns rather than reproduce axiomatic reasoning, causing frequent hallucinations. Here, we show that G-Frame, an adaptive multi-agent framework integrating Bayesian and team game principles, establishes an automated closed-loop for high-quality data synthesis and model training. By forcing the internalization of domain constraints through structured reasoning, we synthesized a specialized corpus of 363,045 chains-of-thought and 199,589 question-answer pairs. The resulting 7B model OmniChem achieves performance parity with GPT 4o mini on custom benchmarks and ChemBench while exhibiting a 79.46% reduction in hallucinations relative to its base architecture. We further demonstrate the advanced capabilities of OmniChem in molecular design and synthesis planning. This work establishes a scalable paradigm utilizing adaptive multi-agents to overcome inherent reasoning deficiencies, offering a feasible pathway for accelerating knowledge discovery in specialized scientific fields.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08403