Single-image, multi-image, and video deep research require different visual operations but share a workflow of visual grounding, external retrieval, and fact composition. A key challenge is to preserve the dependencies linking localized visual anchors, entity relations, source-supported facts, and answer-producing operations. We introduce OneSearch-VL, a unified agent centered on the Visually Grounded Evidence Graph (VGEG), which encodes these dependencies as a shared task-level reference for data construction, process supervision, and operation-level evaluation. Our VGEG-based data engine constructs and verifies multi-image and video questions and filters expert trajectories. Using these data, we assemble OneSearch-VL-SFT-110K and OneSearch-VL-RL-10K for SFT and RL, respectively. We further derive the Evidence-aware Visual-Grounded Rubric reward (EVGR) from VGEG annotations to supervise evidence traceability and visual grounding during RL. For fine-grained evaluation, we construct OneSearch-MI-Bench and OneSearch-Video-Bench, organizing questions by the research operations encoded in their VGEGs. Experiments show that OneSearch-VL-8B improves over Qwen3-VL-8B with tool access by 20.2 and 17.6 percentage points on the two new benchmarks, respectively, while also achieving substantial gains across 7 image benchmarks and VideoDR. Project repository: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12419
LLM developers post-train their models to exhibit prosocial values and behavioral traits, which are enumerated in an alignment target. However, while recent post-training developments have yielded models that score highly on alignment evaluations, training models on sets of narrow behaviors still influences their behavior across unseen contexts and environments in unexpected ways. In this paper, we establish the task of alignment generalization prediction, i.e., predicting how fine-tuning a model to follow a given value changes its behavior across a wide range of held-out values. We conduct a large-scale analysis of alignment generalization effects across 66 values found in modern alignment targets, and benchmark representational techniques on the alignment generalization prediction task. We find that representations based on model activations when applying values in context significantly outperform methods based on textual descriptions of the values. Specifically, the best activations-based methods achieve correlations of 0.45 with our generalization matrix, compared with 0.05 from description-based baselines. We then show the applicability of representations that predict alignment generalization toward downstream tasks by using them to measure how similar the values in a multi-value alignment target are, which we find is significantly correlated with model robustness. Finally, we show initial evidence towards a shared, model-independent value space, which we use to develop the first taxonomy of LLM values grounded in empirical generalization dynamics. Our work demonstrates the importance of studying value generalization in LLMs and its application toward the more empirical design and training of model behavior.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12410
Existing spatial reasoning benchmarks mainly test spatial perception: reading off relations already visible in the input. Yet real-world spatial intelligence demands predictive spatial reasoning: constructing a scene from observations, anticipating how an intervention changes it, and reasoning about the unseen outcome. We introduce SpaceCast-Bench, the first benchmark to directly and diagnostically evaluate this capability. Built around an observe-transform-infer framework, its 3,862 questions from 182 real-world scenes span 16 task types at three levels: static perception, local prediction, and global prediction, progressively requiring scene understanding, spatial state updating, and relational inference over unobserved outcomes. Evaluating 21 models exposes a stark gap: the strongest model reaches only 58.0% against 87.2% human performance, while spatially specialized models remain near random chance. Controlled analyses further reveal that bridge views are critical for integrating distributed observations, and that explicit 3D evidence benefits models more reliably than generated outcome images or videos. Fine-tuning on our programmatically generated data lifts Qwen3-VL-4B from 34.0% to 65.7% with macro-average gains across six out-of-domain benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12402
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to identify and use geometric relations in diagrams. Recent methods address this challenge by converting geometric entities, relations, and constraints into explicit textual representations for the model to reason over. However, effective formalization is highly non-trivial: on Geometry3K, structure injection fixes 28 errors but introduces 13 new ones among 200 examples. Redundant relations can distract the model, while ambiguous references to diagram elements can lead it to apply constraints incorrectly. This suggests that the key challenge is not merely extracting more geometric facts, but organizing them into representations that support downstream reasoning. To fully exploit the power of formalization, we further propose GeoReform, a reflective formalization evolution framework that treats formalization as an optimizable policy rather than a fixed parser output. GeoReform executes the full reasoning pipeline, collects failed rollouts, diagnoses defects in the current representation, and mutates the policy to better select, ground, group, and present geometric entities, relations, constraints, and targets. On Geometry3K, GeoReform improves Qwen3VL-2B accuracy from 42.0\% to 56.0\%. Extensive experiments and analyses across geometry reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that effective formalization is crucial for improving multimodal geometry reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12391
As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can describe increasingly complex visual scenes, token-level grounding becomes crucial. Yet, when an MLLM generates "the yellow banana on the left", established grounding approaches focus on what is in the image ("banana"), overlooking tokens that help describe which instance is meant ("yellow", "left"). In this work, we ask whether frozen MLLM representations contain decodable grounding information about the referred instance across generated tokens, extending to modifiers such as attributes, spatial expressions, and relational/action terms. To address this question, we introduce OTTER, a lightweight supervised probe over frozen MLLM representations that uses Optimal Transport (OT) to align generated tokens with visual regions and produce compact grounding maps. Our results show that (i) instance-discriminative visual information can be decoded from modifier tokens, with the clearest evidence for spatial terms, but (ii) is not confined to them, as contextualized object nouns also carry referential information; (iii) the recovered grounding remains informative under context perturbations, while selected regions remain relevant to generation; and (iv) the learned OT-based grounding extends beyond the controlled setting to free generation and cross-dataset transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12305
Declarative logic programs offer a powerful and interpretable abstraction for encoding relational structure and neurosymbolic reasoning, by expressing dependencies as weighted compositional rules. However, inducing them from data remains fundamentally hard, bottlenecked by the combinatorial explosion of symbolic search spaces. LLMs have recently emerged as powerful hypothesis generators, but when used in isolation, they lack the capacity to do systematic inductive reasoning needed to reliably synthesize valid programs that fit complex relational distributions. We introduce grasp (Gradient-boosted Synthesis of Probabilistic logic programs), a neurosymbolic framework that casts relational structure learning as functional gradient boosting in which the weak learner is a first-order rule and the intractable inner search is delegated to an LLM proposal oracle. We evaluate grasp on four relational benchmarks spanning molecular toxicity prediction (Tox21), mutagenesis, and citation matching (Cora), and show that it improves over purely symbolic, neural, and LLM-based baselines, while producing interpretable weighted rule ensembles. By replacing combinatorial search with gradient-guided LLM hypothesis generation, grasp retains boosting guarantees without sacrificing the transparency of symbolic outputs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12303
Dense retrieval usually ranks text chunks by their semantic similarity to a question. This ignores structure that many data systems already store, including section membership, session boundaries, and native order. We propose NativeScope, a scope-then-rank method for queries with a known anchor and relation. It represents a query as q -> (A, r, B). The anchor A and relation r select native units through belonging, before, or after operators, and the target term B ranks only chunks that overlap the selected scope. An internal variant, NS-FullQ, ranks the same candidates with the full question. We evaluate both methods on 200 controlled document and memory records derived from QASPER and LongMemEval under a 1,024-token budget. NativeScope attains native-unit recall of 89.28 percent for documents and 72.50 percent for memories, improving over instance-wide Dense RAG by 42.75 and 22.00 percentage points. NS-FullQ reaches 87.78 percent and 68.50 percent; its differences from NativeScope are inconclusive, locating the primary gain in relational scoping rather than the shorter ranking query. With automatic Top-1 anchors, memory recall falls to 35.50 percent. NativeScope is therefore effective when anchor coordinates and native relations are reliable, but hard scoping inherits errors from the localization interface.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12243
A robot that assists people must often act on what a person has shown rather than said: which of several identical cartons was pointed at, or which box was handled. The plan is executed from the final scene, whereas the evidence occurs earlier, possibly on objects that have since moved. We propose instance-anchored interaction evidence (IAE), which registers every object of the final scene to its public identifier, keeps each identity through the video by backward mask propagation, and describes every frame by the geometry between hands, forearms and these instances. An evidence network trained only from task outcomes scores the instances. For pointing tasks, a grammar-constrained dynamic program trained with a structured loss decodes object-destination programs; symbolic programs handle reference disambiguation and, without learning, episodic tasks. On 1,255 WatchAct benchmark requests, scored by symbolic execution, IAE reaches 64.2% plan success on implicit-intent tasks against 27.5% for a 32B vision-language model (strict success 49.7% against 15.4%), and 46.4% against 27.0% on restoration, reversal and imitation without task-specific training. Controls with the same perception overlays, the same 32 frames, forward tracking, or a relation model trained on the same labels do not explain the gain. Given IAE's evidence as text with its meaning explained, the same language model reaches 57.4%: most of the gain comes from the instance-anchored evidence, and the explicit programs add 6.8 points at a fraction of the cost. Pointing remains the hardest case, with 16.9% strict success. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12157
Elucidating molecular structures from spectra is a foundational problem in chemical and materials characterization, yet remains challenging due to spectral ambiguity and the vast molecular space. Although recent diffusion-based generators show strong promise for spectra-conditioned elucidation, existing methods struggle to learn robust spectra-structure relationships from limited paired data when relying solely on global spectral representation. Moreover, the repeated full sampling inference strategy incurs substantial computation overhead. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{MAST}, a \textbf{M}otif-\textbf{A}ugmented diffusion framework with \textbf{S}earch \textbf{T}ree, for joint 2D-3D spectroscopic molecular structure elucidation. MAST introduces explicit, interpretable \emph{motif priors} as intermediate evidences throughout denoising, reducing conditional ambiguity and facilitating spectra-conditioned optimization. We further cast diffusion sampling as \emph{reward-guided tree search} to prioritize high-reward denoising trajectories, yielding a compact set of spectra-consistent candidates under limited budgets. On the QM9S multi-spectra benchmark, MAST achieves \textbf{94.89\%} exact recovery and improves 3D fidelity, while preserving high chemical validity and stability. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12067
Digital technologies have made Islamic narratives more accessible, but existing platforms provide limited support for structured learning and comprehension of these stories, particularly in Arabic and multilingual settings. We present ILM, an interactive educational platform for Stories of the Prophets that combines Arabic natural language processing, structured knowledge representation, and retrieval-based question generation. Admin-approved Arabic narratives are processed by a Knowledge Graph (KG) Constructor Engine that identifies entities and narrative relationships and stores them as structured knowledge, enabling learners to explore stories through a visual story map and answer entity- and relation-based questions generated from the KG. Separately, a multilingual retrieval pipeline retrieves relevant passages from the original narratives to generate multiple-choice and open-ended comprehension questions. For open-ended questions, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluates learners' answers against the retrieved passages and reference answers to determine correctness. The platform also incorporates Quranic content as a separate enrichment layer, allowing selected narratives to be supplemented with source-supported information. By combining structured knowledge with passage-based retrieval, ILM supports narrative exploration, comprehension, and assessment across Arabic and multilingual content. The system demonstrates the feasibility of combining structured knowledge representation and retrieval-based generation to support interactive learning of Islamic narratives. A demo is available at this http URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12064
Robotic systems operating over extended tasks must maintain a world state assembled from observations arriving at different times, with varying confidence and potential revisions. Conventional representations emphasize latest estimates, hindering fact provenance, decision reproduction, or execution auditing. We present Traceable World State (TWS), a middleware-neutral semantic representation and reference runtime for provenance-aware robot world state. A TWS snapshot captures entities, relations, observations, confidence, and revision metadata. Validated update operations transform snapshots immutably, ordered updates support deterministic replay, and a canonical SHA-256 hash chain ensures tamper-evident logs. We evaluate TWS through schema conformance, complete state lifecycles, deterministic replay, and fault injection. Passing 38 tests across Python 3.10-3.14, the framework detects record corruptions, broken hash links, sequence discontinuities, and world mismatches. Across ten public BEHAVIOR-1K task definitions, TWS imported 153 entities and 146 relations with successful validation. On 103 NVIDIA Unitree G1 simulated trajectories containing 78,369 frames, TWS achieved exact terminal-state replay in all episodes and detected 412/412 injected corruptions with a 1.72% storage overhead over Plain JSONL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12033
Increasingly, AI interviewers are being developed to elicit open-ended responses in applications like market research, public polling, preference elicitation, and social science research. However, evaluating AI interviewers is challenging because they function in extended, multi-turn interactions where they must adapt to participant behaviors. To address this need, we develop InterviewPlayground, a simulation environment for evaluating AI interviewers using simulated study participants whose behaviors are grounded in social theory. Simulated studies in InterviewPlayground produce an InterviewReportCard, which assesses the performance of AI interviewers using a suite of validated measures. To test whether our simulation-based evaluations predict performance with human participants, we conduct 15 real qualitative studies with five AI interviewers, three interview topics, and 450 human participants and compare them to simulated studies in InterviewPlayground. We find that AI interviewer performance in InterviewPlayground predicts performance in human studies with an average Pearson correlation of 0.86 across 12 measures, and the simulated interactions from InterviewPlayground reproduce key findings from behavioral analysis of AI interviewers in the human studies. Together, these findings support the validity of InterviewPlayground in assessing AI interviewer performance and examining potential failure modes. Our work contributes a simulation environment for AI interviewers supported with empirical validation, and more broadly, a roadmap for future work to develop validated, simulation-based evaluations of conversational AI systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12023
Predictive representation learning from photoplethysmography (PPG) can violate causal information access even with causal attention, as normalization, nonlocal transforms, or companion views may depend on withheld samples. We introduce PulseBound, a PPG representation learner combining physiologically structured future-beat prediction with an explicit stored-window information boundary. A content-independent cutoff separates the visible prefix from the prediction target. Prefix-only normalization, suffix replacement before derived-view construction, and aligned masking ensure that encoder inputs depend only on the visible prefix and cutoff. This yields stored-suffix invariance: with fixed model state, randomness, prefix, and cutoff, changing the stored suffix cannot change the forecast context. A shared horizon-conditioned head predicts nine rhythm and morphology descriptors for up to four extractor-valid future beats, using elementwise validity masks; optional ECG-derived pulse-arrival-time supervision is restricted to training. On MIMIC and VitalDB groups held out from PulseBound backbone pretraining, PulseBound reduces nine-state transformed-space MAE relative to last-visible-beat persistence by 28.06% and 22.22%, respectively, with gains in MAE, MAE-Skill, and Spearman correlation across all 40 source-cutoff-horizon cells. In a separate comparison of seven models on 13 downstream tasks, PulseBound achieves the best mean on nine frozen linear-probe and seven full-fine-tuning tasks. Stored-suffix interventions cause zero recorded changes in forecast contexts or predictions, with zero suffix-input gradients at audited precision under the stored-window interface. These findings separate three testable aspects of predictive physiological representation learning: information access, supervised future structure, and transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12010
Adversarial attacks on vision-language models optimize an image toward a text target, then cite the attacked model's similarity score as evidence of success. We ask whether that score - victim-space target alignment (VTS) - predicts recovery of the target by an independent model. We first build a measurement instrument: supervised judges outside the attacked geometry, real-target blend controls, shuffled-target negatives, and a reference level derived from a 50% target-image blend. Two preregistered studies then compare six contrastive encoders under a matched attack at three perturbation budgets. Robustly trained encoders (FARE, TeCoA, PMG, TRADES) transfer substantially more independent evidence than vanilla CLIP or SigLIP; all eight contrasts reject at the bootstrap floor. However, no cell reaches the blend-derived reference level. The three best cells fall within its replication band, leaving practical recovery undecided. Within robust encoders, per-sample alignment gain correlates with evidence gain ($\rho = 0.24-0.51$); within vanilla CLIP the correlation is consistent with zero. Across encoders we find no monotone alignment-evidence relation. VTS is therefore informative only within a fixed robust encoder, and we provide a reporting protocol in its place.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11938
Media-bridged time series forecasting is expanding to encompass traditional "multivariate" and emerging "multimodal" (e.g., through textual assistance). Existing Time Series Forecasting (TSF) models still rely on paradigm-specific relation, fusion, and temporal modules, hindering a common forecasting backbone across numerical and pre-aligned narrative-flow settings. To explore this, we propose the Multimedia Identity-Aware Prism Network (MIDAPN), a unified spatiotemporal forecasting backbone based on media-general graph adaptation and automatic temporal learning: (1) Following media pre-alignment, our Multimedia Identity-Aware Graph (MIDAG) revisits identity through static essence, dynamic behavior, and latent commonality, inducing affinities that extend variable-specific dependencies across media. Contextual Identity Modulation (CIM) further refines discriminative aggregation. (2) We develop Spectral Prism Convolution (SPConv) to automatically perform hierarchical temporal analysis, balancing coarse trends and fine-grained details. Meanwhile, its Adaptive Search Guidance configures a scale-efficient architecture for temporal-dimension reconstruction. These decoupled yet synergistic components jointly address media identity disentanglement and temporal-scale mismatch. Comprehensive evaluations involving 16 SOTA TSF models across 13 "multivariate" and 12 "multimodal" datasets, alongside targeted long-context comparisons against 14 time series foundation models and fused pretrained language models, demonstrate MIDAPN's consistent superiority and broad shared backbone compatibility. The code is available at \href{this https URL}{this https URL}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11924
The brain maintains stable cognition despite continuously changing neural activity. How to extract stable cognitive states from variable neural observations remains a central problem in neural decoding. Existing neural decoding methods map neural observations to predefined external labels based on the stimulus-response principle, often capturing recording-specific spurious correlations. Inspired by how the brain infers the world, and specifically by Bayesian brain theory, we recast neural decoding as cognitive inference constrained by brain-intrinsic priors, yielding high-level meta-neural semantic representations. In decoding experiments spanning five neural recording modalities and three cognitive domains (motor, perception and internal mentation), our cognitive inference method reorganized the geometry of neural observation representations, yielding meta-neural semantic representations that exhibited consistent geometric relationships across cognitive tasks and enabled the recovery of stable cognitive states from variable neural observations. Our work provides an account of how the brain maintains relatively stable cognition despite continual changes in the external environment. Cognitive stability is sustained through cognitive inference from changing neural activity, without requiring fixed neural activity patterns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11923
For persistent and personalized conversational agents, memory systems can enable them to remember, update, and reason over long histories by storing past interactions and retrieving relevant information. Existing memory systems typically follow two paradigms: flat-structured memory and graph-based memory. The former is lightweight but leaves event relations and state updates implicit, while the latter explicitly models memory structure but incurs additional construction cost and introduces irrelevant relations over long histories. To address these limitations, we propose QGMem, a novel memory construction and activation framework motivated by human memory, in which experience is organized into events and query-relevant events are modeled by graph as working memory. QGMem converts long dialogue histories into event-indexed atomic memory units that preserve individual experiences and consolidates related units into dynamic memory traces that retain state trajectories and current states. When a query arrives, hybrid memory retrieval gathers complementary candidate memories, and query-aware reranking activates the most relevant units as a compact working memory. To expose relational dependencies in the working memory and support conflict-aware reasoning, QGMem organizes the working memory as a local graph, which is then encoded as a graph token and provided to the LLM together with the textual working memory to improve evidence utilization during answer generation. Experiments across six benchmarks validate the framework and show consistent gains in retrieval, multi-hop evidence composition, conflict resolution, and ultra-long dialogue reasoning with compact contexts and moderate inference cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11920
Stance detection requires identifying an author's attitude toward a given target, sometimes based on conversational context. Jev, a specialized decision model designed for structured decision-making, offers an alternative to general-purpose large language models (LLMs). In this work, we evaluate Jev on two stance detection datasets, VAST (English texts) and ZS-CSD (Chinese conversations), comparing it with four general-purpose LLMs and two fine-tuned models. Results show that Jev achieves competitive performance on VAST, matching GPT-5.6 and outperforming the other general-purpose LLMs. However, it falls behind stronger LLMs on ZS-CSD, particularly in distinguishing favor from against. Further analysis suggests that this limitation may be related to understanding reply relationships and stance direction rather than conversation length alone. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of Jev for stance detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11901
Music understanding often requires comparing excerpts and reasoning about relationships among songs, sections, and stems. However, existing large audio-language models (LALMs) and music question-answering datasets typically operate on single recordings or compare independently sampled tracks with no known production relationship. We introduce STEMMA, a multi-audio music question-answering framework built around production provenance: whether excerpts originate from the same track or section, and which stems belong to which mixtures. Because such relations are sparse under conventional audio-first sampling, STEMMA adopts a relation-first construction strategy: it first specifies a target relation and then queries the catalog for excerpts that satisfy it and hard negatives that do not. Labels are determined directly from catalog provenance rather than generated by a language model from metadata. We build STEMMA-Bench for evaluation and a track-disjoint training set, STEMMA-Instruct. Fine-tuning two LALMs on STEMMA-Instruct improves multi-audio reasoning, with the largest gains on structural relations directly determined by the catalog, while preserving single-audio music understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11884
Long-horizon tasks require LLM agents to continually draw on information from earlier interactions. However, retaining the full history increases context costs, while compressing it risks losing details needed later, and the relevance of historical information often becomes apparent as the task progresses. To address these challenges, we propose FlowState, which treats execution state as memory that can be retained and revisited across requests, unifying current decision-making with the reuse of historical information. FlowState preserves semantically typed state nodes, their relations, and references to raw tool observations, separating persistent retention from on-demand access. Within a single execution loop, Incremental State Update (ISU) maintains the current state based on new inputs and feedback, while Progressive State Access (PSA) progressively reveals historical states and supporting evidence as needed during reasoning. Together, these mechanisms enable agents to reassess prior decisions in light of new information and guide subsequent actions. Compared with a full-context baseline using the same DeepSeek-V4-Flash model, FlowState improves the average success rate on MemoryArena and the average pass rate on $\tau^3$-Bench by 4.55 and 13.95 percentage points, respectively, while reducing total token consumption by 43.2% and 40.6%. These results demonstrate the performance and efficiency advantages of FlowState on long-horizon tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34565