new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Jul 20

SMMILE: An Expert-Driven Benchmark for Multimodal Medical In-Context Learning

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) remains underexplored despite significant potential for domains such as medicine. Clinicians routinely encounter diverse, specialized tasks requiring adaptation from limited examples, such as drawing insights from a few relevant prior cases or considering a constrained set of differential diagnoses. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown advances in medical visual question answering (VQA), their ability to learn multimodal tasks from context is largely unknown. We introduce SMMILE, the first expert-driven multimodal ICL benchmark for medical tasks. Eleven medical experts curated problems, each including a multimodal query and multimodal in-context examples as task demonstrations. SMMILE encompasses 111 problems (517 question-image-answer triplets) covering 6 medical specialties and 13 imaging modalities. We further introduce SMMILE++, an augmented variant with 1038 permuted problems. A comprehensive evaluation of 15 MLLMs demonstrates that most models exhibit moderate to poor multimodal ICL ability in medical tasks. In open-ended evaluations, ICL contributes only 8% average improvement over zero-shot on SMMILE and 9.4% on SMMILE++. We observe a susceptibility for irrelevant in-context examples: even a single noisy or irrelevant example can degrade performance by up to 9.5%. Moreover, example ordering exhibits a recency bias, i.e., placing the most relevant example last can lead to substantial performance improvements by up to 71%. Our findings highlight critical limitations and biases in current MLLMs when learning multimodal medical tasks from context.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 26, 2025 1

CyberPal.AI: Empowering LLMs with Expert-Driven Cybersecurity Instructions

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP), providing versatile capabilities across various applications. However, their application to complex, domain-specific tasks, such as cyber-security, often faces substantial challenges. In this study, we introduce SecKnowledge and CyberPal.AI to address these challenges and train security-expert LLMs. SecKnowledge is a domain-knowledge-driven cyber-security instruction dataset, meticulously designed using years of accumulated expert knowledge in the domain through a multi-phase generation process. CyberPal.AI refers to a family of LLMs fine-tuned using SecKnowledge, aimed at building security-specialized LLMs capable of answering and following complex security-related instructions. Additionally, we introduce SecKnowledge-Eval, a comprehensive and diverse cyber-security evaluation benchmark, composed of an extensive set of cyber-security tasks we specifically developed to assess LLMs in the field of cyber-security, along with other publicly available security benchmarks. Our results show a significant average improvement of up to 24% over the baseline models, underscoring the benefits of our expert-driven instruction dataset generation process. These findings contribute to the advancement of AI-based cyber-security applications, paving the way for security-expert LLMs that can enhance threat-hunting and investigation processes.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 17, 2024

MEXA: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning with Dynamic Multi-Expert Aggregation

Combining pre-trained expert models offers substantial potential for scalable multimodal reasoning, but building a unified framework remains challenging due to the increasing diversity of input modalities and task complexity. For instance, medical diagnosis requires precise reasoning over structured clinical tables, while financial forecasting depends on interpreting plot-based data to make informed predictions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce MEXA, a training-free framework that performs modality- and task-aware aggregation of multiple expert models to enable effective multimodal reasoning across diverse and distinct domains. MEXA dynamically selects expert models based on the input modality and the task-specific reasoning demands (i.e., skills). Each expert model, specialized in a modality task pair, generates interpretable textual reasoning outputs. MEXA then aggregates and reasons over these outputs using a Large Reasoning Model (LRM) to produce the final answer. This modular design allows flexible and transparent multimodal reasoning across diverse domains without additional training overhead. We extensively evaluate our approach on diverse multimodal benchmarks, including Video Reasoning, Audio Reasoning, 3D Understanding, and Medical QA. MEXA consistently delivers performance improvements over strong multimodal baselines, highlighting the effectiveness and broad applicability of our expert-driven selection and aggregation in diverse multimodal reasoning tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 20, 2025 2

The Impact of Large Language Models on Scientific Discovery: a Preliminary Study using GPT-4

In recent years, groundbreaking advancements in natural language processing have culminated in the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs), which have showcased remarkable capabilities across a vast array of domains, including the understanding, generation, and translation of natural language, and even tasks that extend beyond language processing. In this report, we delve into the performance of LLMs within the context of scientific discovery, focusing on GPT-4, the state-of-the-art language model. Our investigation spans a diverse range of scientific areas encompassing drug discovery, biology, computational chemistry (density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD)), materials design, and partial differential equations (PDE). Evaluating GPT-4 on scientific tasks is crucial for uncovering its potential across various research domains, validating its domain-specific expertise, accelerating scientific progress, optimizing resource allocation, guiding future model development, and fostering interdisciplinary research. Our exploration methodology primarily consists of expert-driven case assessments, which offer qualitative insights into the model's comprehension of intricate scientific concepts and relationships, and occasionally benchmark testing, which quantitatively evaluates the model's capacity to solve well-defined domain-specific problems. Our preliminary exploration indicates that GPT-4 exhibits promising potential for a variety of scientific applications, demonstrating its aptitude for handling complex problem-solving and knowledge integration tasks. Broadly speaking, we evaluate GPT-4's knowledge base, scientific understanding, scientific numerical calculation abilities, and various scientific prediction capabilities.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 13, 2023

VideoRFT: Incentivizing Video Reasoning Capability in MLLMs via Reinforced Fine-Tuning

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has shown great promise in achieving humanlevel reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), and has recently been extended to MLLMs. Nevertheless, reasoning about videos, which is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, remains a persistent challenge due to the complex logic, temporal and causal structures inherent in video data. To fill this gap, we propose VideoRFT, a novel approach that extends the RFT paradigm to cultivate human-like video reasoning capabilities in MLLMs. VideoRFT follows the standard two-stage scheme in RFT: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations, followed by reinforcement learning (RL) to improve generalization. A central challenge to achieve this in the video domain lies in the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality video CoT datasets. We address this by building a multi-expert-driven, cognition-inspired CoT curation pipeline. First, we devise a cognition-inspired prompting strategy to elicit a reasoning LLM to generate preliminary CoTs based solely on rich, structured, and literal representations of video content. Subsequently, these CoTs are revised by a MLLM conditioned on the actual video, ensuring visual consistency and reducing visual hallucinations. This pipeline results in two new datasets, i.e.VideoRFT-CoT-102K for SFT and VideoRFT-RL-310K for RL. To further strengthen the RL phase, we introduce a novel semantic-consistency reward that explicitly promotes the alignment between textual reasoning and visual evidence. This reward encourages the model to produce coherent, context-aware reasoning outputs grounded in visual input. Extensive experiments show that VideoRFT achieves state-of-the-art performance on six video reasoning benchmarks.

  • 5 authors
·
May 18, 2025

MEMTRACK: Evaluating Long-Term Memory and State Tracking in Multi-Platform Dynamic Agent Environments

Recent works on context and memory benchmarking have primarily focused on conversational instances but the need for evaluating memory in dynamic enterprise environments is crucial for its effective application. We introduce MEMTRACK, a benchmark designed to evaluate long-term memory and state tracking in multi-platform agent environments. MEMTRACK models realistic organizational workflows by integrating asynchronous events across multiple communication and productivity platforms such as Slack, Linear and Git. Each benchmark instance provides a chronologically platform-interleaved timeline, with noisy, conflicting, cross-referring information as well as potential codebase/file-system comprehension and exploration. Consequently, our benchmark tests memory capabilities such as acquistion, selection and conflict resolution. We curate the MEMTRACK dataset through both manual expert driven design and scalable agent based synthesis, generating ecologically valid scenarios grounded in real world software development processes. We introduce pertinent metrics for Correctness, Efficiency, and Redundancy that capture the effectiveness of memory mechanisms beyond simple QA performance. Experiments across SoTA LLMs and memory backends reveal challenges in utilizing memory across long horizons, handling cross-platform dependencies, and resolving contradictions. Notably, the best performing GPT-5 model only achieves a 60\% Correctness score on MEMTRACK. This work provides an extensible framework for advancing evaluation research for memory-augmented agents, beyond existing focus on conversational setups, and sets the stage for multi-agent, multi-platform memory benchmarking in complex organizational settings

PatronusAI Patronus AI
·
Oct 1, 2025 2

Developing Vision-Language-Action Model from Egocentric Videos

Egocentric videos capture how humans manipulate objects and tools, providing diverse motion cues for learning object manipulation. Unlike the costly, expert-driven manual teleoperation commonly used in training Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs), egocentric videos offer a scalable alternative. However, prior studies that leverage such videos for training robot policies typically rely on auxiliary annotations, such as detailed hand-pose recordings. Consequently, it remains unclear whether VLAs can be trained directly from raw egocentric videos. In this work, we address this challenge by leveraging EgoScaler, a framework that extracts 6DoF object manipulation trajectories from egocentric videos without requiring auxiliary recordings. We apply EgoScaler to four large-scale egocentric video datasets and automatically refine noisy or incomplete trajectories, thereby constructing a new large-scale dataset for VLA pre-training. Our experiments with a state-of-the-art π_0 architecture in both simulated and real-robot environments yield three key findings: (i) pre-training on our dataset improves task success rates by over 20\% compared to training from scratch, (ii) the performance is competitive with that achieved using real-robot datasets, and (iii) combining our dataset with real-robot data yields further improvements. These results demonstrate that egocentric videos constitute a promising and scalable resource for advancing VLA research.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

Automatic Image-Level Morphological Trait Annotation for Organismal Images

Morphological traits are physical characteristics of biological organisms that provide vital clues on how organisms interact with their environment. Yet extracting these traits remains a slow, expert-driven process, limiting their use in large-scale ecological studies. A major bottleneck is the absence of high-quality datasets linking biological images to trait-level annotations. In this work, we demonstrate that sparse autoencoders trained on foundation-model features yield monosemantic, spatially grounded neurons that consistently activate on meaningful morphological parts. Leveraging this property, we introduce a trait annotation pipeline that localizes salient regions and uses vision-language prompting to generate interpretable trait descriptions. Using this approach, we construct Bioscan-Traits, a dataset of 80K trait annotations spanning 19K insect images from BIOSCAN-5M. Human evaluation confirms the biological plausibility of the generated morphological descriptions. We assess design sensitivity through a comprehensive ablation study, systematically varying key design choices and measuring their impact on the quality of the resulting trait descriptions. By annotating traits with a modular pipeline rather than prohibitively expensive manual efforts, we offer a scalable way to inject biologically meaningful supervision into foundation models, enable large-scale morphological analyses, and bridge the gap between ecological relevance and machine-learning practicality.

The Last Harness You'll Ever Build

AI agents are increasingly deployed on complex, domain-specific workflows -- navigating enterprise web applications that require dozens of clicks and form fills, orchestrating multi-step research pipelines that span search, extraction, and synthesis, automating code review across unfamiliar repositories, and handling customer escalations that demand nuanced domain knowledge. Each new task domain requires painstaking, expert-driven harness engineering: designing the prompts, tools, orchestration logic, and evaluation criteria that make a foundation model effective. We present a two-level framework that automates this process. At the first level, the Harness Evolution Loop optimizes a worker agent's harness H for a single task: a Worker Agent W_{H} executes the task, an Evaluator Agent V adversarially diagnoses failures and scores performance, and an Evolution Agent E modifies the harness based on the full history of prior attempts. At the second level, the Meta-Evolution Loop optimizes the evolution protocol Λ= (W_{H}, H^{(0)}, V, E) itself across diverse tasks, learning a protocol Λ^{(text{best)} that enables rapid harness convergence on any new task -- so that adapting an agent to a novel domain requires no human harness engineering at all.} We formalize the correspondence to meta-learning and present both algorithms. The framework shifts manual harness engineering into automated harness engineering, and takes one step further -- automating the design of the automation itself.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 21 2

Leum-VL Technical Report

A short video succeeds not simply because of what it shows, but because of how it schedules attention -- yet current multimodal models lack the structural grammar to parse or produce this organization. Existing models can describe scenes, answer event-centric questions, and read on-screen text, but they are far less reliable at identifying timeline-grounded units such as hooks, cut rationales, shot-induced tension, and platform-facing packaging cues. We propose SV6D (Structured Video in Six Dimensions), inspired by professional storyboard practice in film and television production, a representation framework that decomposes internet-native video into six complementary structural dimensions -- subject, aesthetics, camera language, editing, narrative, and dissemination -- with each label tied to physically observable evidence on the timeline. We formalize a unified optimization objective over SV6D that combines Hungarian-matched temporal alignment, dimension-wise semantic label distance, and quality regularization. Building on this framework, we present Leum-VL-8B, an 8B video-language model that realizes the SV6D objective through an expert-driven post-training pipeline, further refined through verifiable reinforcement learning on perception-oriented tasks. Leum-VL-8B achieves 70.8 on VideoMME (w/o subtitles), 70.0 on MVBench, and 61.6 on MotionBench, while remaining competitive on general multimodal evaluations such as MMBench-EN. We also construct FeedBench, a benchmark for structure-sensitive short-video understanding. Our results indicate that the missing layer in video AI is not pixel generation but structural representation: grounded on the timeline, linked to visible evidence, and directly consumable by downstream workflows such as editing, retrieval, recommendation, and generation control, including text-heavy internet video formats with overlays and image-text layouts.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20 1

AgenticSciML: Collaborative Multi-Agent Systems for Emergent Discovery in Scientific Machine Learning

Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) integrates data-driven inference with physical modeling to solve complex problems in science and engineering. However, the design of SciML architectures, loss formulations, and training strategies remains an expert-driven research process, requiring extensive experimentation and problem-specific insights. Here we introduce AgenticSciML, a collaborative multi-agent system in which over 10 specialized AI agents collaborate to propose, critique, and refine SciML solutions through structured reasoning and iterative evolution. The framework integrates structured debate, retrieval-augmented method memory, and ensemble-guided evolutionary search, enabling the agents to generate and assess new hypotheses about architectures and optimization procedures. Across physics-informed learning and operator learning tasks, the framework discovers solution methods that outperform single-agent and human-designed baselines by up to four orders of magnitude in error reduction. The agents produce novel strategies -- including adaptive mixture-of-expert architectures, decomposition-based PINNs, and physics-informed operator learning models -- that do not appear explicitly in the curated knowledge base. These results show that collaborative reasoning among AI agents can yield emergent methodological innovation, suggesting a path toward scalable, transparent, and autonomous discovery in scientific computing.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 14

VISION: Prompting Ocean Vertical Velocity Reconstruction from Incomplete Observations

Reconstructing subsurface ocean dynamics, such as vertical velocity fields, from incomplete surface observations poses a critical challenge in Earth science, a field long hampered by the lack of standardized, analysis-ready benchmarks. To systematically address this issue and catalyze research, we first build and release KD48, a high-resolution ocean dynamics benchmark derived from petascale simulations and curated with expert-driven denoising. Building on this benchmark, we introduce VISION, a novel reconstruction paradigm based on Dynamic Prompting designed to tackle the core problem of missing data in real-world observations. The essence of VISION lies in its ability to generate a visual prompt on-the-fly from any available subset of observations, which encodes both data availability and the ocean's physical state. More importantly, we design a State-conditioned Prompting module that efficiently injects this prompt into a universal backbone, endowed with geometry- and scale-aware operators, to guide its adaptive adjustment of computational strategies. This mechanism enables VISION to precisely handle the challenges posed by varying input combinations. Extensive experiments on the KD48 benchmark demonstrate that VISION not only substantially outperforms state-of-the-art models but also exhibits strong generalization under extreme data missing scenarios. By providing a high-quality benchmark and a robust model, our work establishes a solid infrastructure for ocean science research under data uncertainty. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/YuanGao-YG/VISION.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

From Text to Actionable Intelligence: Automating STIX Entity and Relationship Extraction

Sharing methods of attack and their effectiveness is a cornerstone of building robust defensive systems. Threat analysis reports, produced by various individuals and organizations, play a critical role in supporting security operations and combating emerging threats. To enhance the timeliness and automation of threat intelligence sharing, several standards have been established, with the Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX) framework emerging as one of the most widely adopted. However, generating STIX-compatible data from unstructured security text remains a largely manual, expert-driven process. To address this challenge, we introduce AZERG, a tool designed to assist security analysts in automatically generating structured STIX representations. To achieve this, we adapt general-purpose large language models for the specific task of extracting STIX-formatted threat data. To manage the complexity, the task is divided into four subtasks: entity detection (T1), entity type identification (T2), related pair detection (T3), and relationship type identification (T4). We apply task-specific fine-tuning to accurately extract relevant entities and infer their relationships in accordance with the STIX specification. To address the lack of training data, we compiled a comprehensive dataset with 4,011 entities and 2,075 relationships extracted from 141 full threat analysis reports, all annotated in alignment with the STIX standard. Our models achieved F1-scores of 84.43% for T1, 88.49% for T2, 95.47% for T3, and 84.60% for T4 in real-world scenarios. We validated their performance against a range of open- and closed-parameter models, as well as state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating improvements of 2-25% across tasks.

Glider: Global and Local Instruction-Driven Expert Router

The availability of performant pre-trained models has led to a proliferation of fine-tuned expert models that are specialized to particular domains. This has enabled the creation of powerful and adaptive routing-based "Model MoErging" methods with the goal of using expert modules to create an aggregate system with improved performance or generalization. However, existing MoErging methods often prioritize generalization to unseen tasks at the expense of performance on held-in tasks, which limits its practical applicability in real-world deployment scenarios. We observe that current token-level routing mechanisms neglect the global semantic context of the input task. This token-wise independence hinders effective expert selection for held-in tasks, as routing decisions fail to incorporate the semantic properties of the task. To address this, we propose, Global and Local Instruction Driven Expert Router (GLIDER) that integrates a multi-scale routing mechanism, encompassing a semantic global router and a learned local router. The global router leverages LLM's advanced reasoning capabilities for semantic-related contexts to enhance expert selection. Given the input query and LLM, the router generates semantic task instructions that guide the retrieval of the most relevant experts across all layers. This global guidance is complemented by a local router that facilitates token-level routing decisions within each module, enabling finer control and enhanced performance on unseen tasks. Our experiments using T5-based models for T0 and FLAN tasks demonstrate that GLIDER achieves substantially improved held-in performance while maintaining strong generalization on held-out tasks. We also perform ablations experiments to dive deeper into the components of GLIDER. Our experiments highlight the importance of our multi-scale routing that leverages LLM-driven semantic reasoning for MoErging methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024

RouteHijack: Routing-Aware Attack on Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

Safety alignment is critical for the responsible deployment of large language models (LLMs). As Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are increasingly adopted to scale model capacity, understanding their safety robustness becomes essential. Existing adversarial attacks, however, have notable limitations. Prompt-based jailbreaks rely on heuristic search and transfer poorly, model intervention methods require privileged access to internal representations, and optimization-based input attacks remain output-centric and are fundamentally limited to MoE models due to the non-differentiable routing mechanism. In this paper, we present RouteHijack, a routing-aware jailbreak for MoE LLMs. Our key insight is that safety behavior is concentrated in a small subset of experts, creating an opportunity to steer model behavior by influencing routing decisions through input optimization. Building on this observation, RouteHijack first performs response-driven expert localization to identify safety-critical and harmful experts by contrasting activations under safe refusals and harmful completions. It then constructs adversarial suffixes with a routing-aware objective that suppresses safety experts, promotes harmful experts, and prevents early-stage refusal during generation. At inference time, the optimized suffix is appended to a malicious prompt, requiring only input access. Across seven MoE LLMs, RouteHijack achieves a 69.3\% average attack success rate (ASR), outperforming prior optimization-based attack by 3.2times. RouteHijack also transfers zero-shot across five sibling MoE variants, raising average ASR from 27.7\% to 61.2\%, and further generalizes to three MoE-based VLMs, increasing average ASR from 2.47\% to 38.7\%. These findings expose a fundamental vulnerability in sparse expert architectures and highlight the need for defenses beyond output-level alignment.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 30

CellAgent: An LLM-driven Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Single-cell Data Analysis

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis is crucial for biological research, as it enables the precise characterization of cellular heterogeneity. However, manual manipulation of various tools to achieve desired outcomes can be labor-intensive for researchers. To address this, we introduce CellAgent (http://cell.agent4science.cn/), an LLM-driven multi-agent framework, specifically designed for the automatic processing and execution of scRNA-seq data analysis tasks, providing high-quality results with no human intervention. Firstly, to adapt general LLMs to the biological field, CellAgent constructs LLM-driven biological expert roles - planner, executor, and evaluator - each with specific responsibilities. Then, CellAgent introduces a hierarchical decision-making mechanism to coordinate these biological experts, effectively driving the planning and step-by-step execution of complex data analysis tasks. Furthermore, we propose a self-iterative optimization mechanism, enabling CellAgent to autonomously evaluate and optimize solutions, thereby guaranteeing output quality. We evaluate CellAgent on a comprehensive benchmark dataset encompassing dozens of tissues and hundreds of distinct cell types. Evaluation results consistently show that CellAgent effectively identifies the most suitable tools and hyperparameters for single-cell analysis tasks, achieving optimal performance. This automated framework dramatically reduces the workload for science data analyses, bringing us into the "Agent for Science" era.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 13, 2024

NORA-1.5: A Vision-Language-Action Model Trained using World Model- and Action-based Preference Rewards

Vision--language--action (VLA) models have recently shown promising performance on a variety of embodied tasks, yet they still fall short in reliability and generalization, especially when deployed across different embodiments or real-world environments. In this work, we introduce NORA-1.5, a VLA model built from the pre-trained NORA backbone by adding to it a flow-matching-based action expert. This architectural enhancement alone yields substantial performance gains, enabling NORA-1.5 to outperform NORA and several state-of-the-art VLA models across both simulated and real-world benchmarks. To further improve robustness and task success, we develop a set of reward models for post-training VLA policies. Our rewards combine (i) an action-conditioned world model (WM) that evaluates whether generated actions lead toward the desired goal, and (ii) a deviation-from-ground-truth heuristic that distinguishes good actions from poor ones. Using these reward signals, we construct preference datasets and adapt NORA-1.5 to target embodiments through direct preference optimization (DPO). Extensive evaluations show that reward-driven post-training consistently improves performance in both simulation and real-robot settings, demonstrating significant VLA model-reliability gains through simple yet effective reward models. Our findings highlight NORA-1.5 and reward-guided post-training as a viable path toward more dependable embodied agents suitable for real-world deployment.

BEADs: Bias Evaluation Across Domains

Recent improvements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced natural language processing (NLP) applications. However, these models can also inherit and perpetuate biases from their training data. Addressing this issue is crucial, yet many existing datasets do not offer evaluation across diverse NLP tasks. To tackle this, we introduce the Bias Evaluations Across Domains (BEADs) dataset, designed to support a wide range of NLP tasks, including text classification, bias entity recognition, bias quantification, and benign language generation. BEADs uses AI-driven annotation combined with experts' verification to provide reliable labels. This method overcomes the limitations of existing datasets that typically depend on crowd-sourcing, expert-only annotations with limited bias evaluations, or unverified AI labeling. Our empirical analysis shows that BEADs is effective in detecting and reducing biases across different language models, with smaller models fine-tuned on BEADs often outperforming LLMs in bias classification tasks. However, these models may still exhibit biases towards certain demographics. Fine-tuning LLMs with our benign language data also reduces biases while preserving the models' knowledge. Our findings highlight the importance of comprehensive bias evaluation and the potential of targeted fine-tuning for reducing the bias of LLMs. We are making BEADs publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/shainar/BEAD Warning: This paper contains examples that may be considered offensive.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

Reward Design for Reinforcement Learning Agents

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding unintended consequences. Effective reward design aims to provide signals that accelerate the agent's convergence to optimal behavior. Crafting rewards that align with task objectives, foster desired behaviors, and prevent undesirable actions is inherently challenging. This thesis delves into the critical role of reward signals in RL, highlighting their impact on the agent's behavior and learning dynamics and addressing challenges such as delayed, ambiguous, or intricate rewards. In this thesis work, we tackle different aspects of reward shaping. First, we address the problem of designing informative and interpretable reward signals from a teacher's/expert's perspective (teacher-driven). Here, the expert, equipped with the optimal policy and the corresponding value function, designs reward signals that expedite the agent's convergence to optimal behavior. Second, we build on this teacher-driven approach by introducing a novel method for adaptive interpretable reward design. In this scenario, the expert tailors the rewards based on the learner's current policy, ensuring alignment and optimal progression. Third, we propose a meta-learning approach, enabling the agent to self-design its reward signals online without expert input (agent-driven). This self-driven method considers the agent's learning and exploration to establish a self-improving feedback loop.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025

Expert Pyramid Tuning: Efficient Parameter Fine-Tuning for Expertise-Driven Task Allocation

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become a dominant paradigm for deploying LLMs in multi-task scenarios due to its extreme parameter efficiency. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based LoRA variants have achieved promising results by dynamically routing tokens to different low-rank experts, they largely overlook the hierarchical nature of task complexity. Existing methods typically employ experts with uniform architectures, limiting their ability to capture diverse feature granularities required by distinct tasks--where some tasks demand high-level semantic abstraction while others require fine-grained syntactic manipulation. To bridge this gap, we propose Expert Pyramid Tuning (EPT), a novel architecture that integrates the multi-scale feature pyramid concept from computer vision into the realm of PEFT. Unlike standard LoRA, EPT decomposes task adaptation into two stages: (1) A shared meta-knowledge Subspace that encodes universal linguistic patterns in low dimensions; (2) A Pyramid Projection Mechanism that utilizes learnable up-projection operators to reconstruct high-dimensional features at varying scales. A task-aware router then dynamically selects the optimal combination of these multi-scale features. Extensive experiments across multiple multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that EPT significantly outperforms SOTA MoE-LoRA variants. Crucially, thanks to the re-parameterization capability of our design, EPT achieves this performance improvement while simultaneously reducing the number of training parameters.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 12

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists

Despite long-standing efforts in accelerating scientific discovery with AI, building AI co-scientists remains challenging due to limited high-quality data for training and evaluation. To tackle this data scarcity issue, we present AutoSDT, an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. AutoSDT leverages the coding capabilities and parametric knowledge of LLMs to search for diverse sources, select ecologically valid tasks, and synthesize accurate task instructions and code solutions. Using our pipeline, we construct AutoSDT-5K, a dataset of 5,404 coding tasks for data-driven discovery that covers four scientific disciplines and 756 unique Python packages. To the best of our knowledge, AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. Expert feedback on a subset of 256 tasks shows the effectiveness of AutoSDT: 93% of the collected tasks are ecologically valid, and 92.2% of the synthesized programs are functionally correct. Trained on AutoSDT-5K, the Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct LLM series, dubbed AutoSDT-Coder, show substantial improvement on two challenging data-driven discovery benchmarks, ScienceAgentBench and DiscoveryBench. Most notably, AutoSDT-Coder-32B reaches the same level of performance as GPT-4o on ScienceAgentBench with a success rate of 7.8%, doubling the performance of its base model. On DiscoveryBench, it lifts the hypothesis matching score to 8.1, bringing a 17.4% relative improvement and closing the gap between open-weight models and GPT-4o.

  • 19 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025

A Modular Approach for Clinical SLMs Driven by Synthetic Data with Pre-Instruction Tuning, Model Merging, and Clinical-Tasks Alignment

High computation costs and latency of large language models such as GPT-4 have limited their deployment in clinical settings. Small language models (SLMs) offer a cost-effective alternative, but their limited capacity requires biomedical domain adaptation, which remains challenging. An additional bottleneck is the unavailability and high sensitivity of clinical data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for adapting SLMs into high-performing clinical models. We introduce the MediPhi collection of 3.8B-parameter SLMs developed with our novel framework: pre-instruction tuning of experts on relevant medical and clinical corpora (PMC, Medical Guideline, MedWiki, etc.), model merging, and clinical-tasks alignment. To cover most clinical tasks, we extended the CLUE benchmark to CLUE+, doubling its size. Our expert models deliver relative improvements on this benchmark over the base model without any task-specific fine-tuning: 64.3% on medical entities, 49.5% on radiology reports, and 44% on ICD-10 coding (outperforming GPT-4-0125 by 14%). We unify the expert models into MediPhi via model merging, preserving gains across benchmarks. Furthermore, we built the MediFlow collection, a synthetic dataset of 2.5 million high-quality instructions on 14 medical NLP tasks, 98 fine-grained document types, and JSON format support. Alignment of MediPhi using supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization achieves further gains of 18.9% on average.

  • 10 authors
·
May 15, 2025 2

EvoRubric: Self-Evolving Rubric-Driven RL for Open-Ended Generation

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in verifiable domains, but aligning models for open-ended generation remains profoundly challenging due to the lack of definitive rewards. Current rubric-based RL methods mitigate this by employing explicit criteria; however, they rely heavily on static, human-annotated rubrics that inevitably cause policy lag, or expensive external proprietary models for dynamic updates. In this paper, we propose EvoRubric, a novel single-policy co-evolutionary RL framework that eliminates the reliance on static criteria and on external rubric generators. By unifying response generation and rubric generation under a single parameterized policy, EvoRubric dynamically alternates between a Reasoner and a Rubric Generator. To prevent reward hacking and ensure the reliability of generated signals, we introduce a multi-level verification pipeline featuring a meta-verifier, zero-variance pruning, and a Leave-One-Out peer consensus mechanism. Validated criteria are dynamically archived into a memory pool, yielding dense, multi-objective rewards to continuously co-optimize both roles. Extensive experiments across Medical, Writing, and Science domains demonstrate that EvoRubric consistently outperforms traditional static and external-LLM-driven alignment methods. Notably, our framework is compatible with human-expert priors. When initialized with expert-annotated rubrics, EvoRubric can further uncover novel, discriminative dimensions, achieving better performance than relying solely on static expert annotations.

  • 9 authors
·
May 27

Subject-driven Text-to-Image Generation via Apprenticeship Learning

Recent text-to-image generation models like DreamBooth have made remarkable progress in generating highly customized images of a target subject, by fine-tuning an ``expert model'' for a given subject from a few examples. However, this process is expensive, since a new expert model must be learned for each subject. In this paper, we present SuTI, a Subject-driven Text-to-Image generator that replaces subject-specific fine tuning with in-context learning. Given a few demonstrations of a new subject, SuTI can instantly generate novel renditions of the subject in different scenes, without any subject-specific optimization. SuTI is powered by apprenticeship learning, where a single apprentice model is learned from data generated by a massive number of subject-specific expert models. Specifically, we mine millions of image clusters from the Internet, each centered around a specific visual subject. We adopt these clusters to train a massive number of expert models, each specializing in a different subject. The apprentice model SuTI then learns to imitate the behavior of these fine-tuned experts. SuTI can generate high-quality and customized subject-specific images 20x faster than optimization-based SoTA methods. On the challenging DreamBench and DreamBench-v2, our human evaluation shows that SuTI significantly outperforms existing models like InstructPix2Pix, Textual Inversion, Imagic, Prompt2Prompt, Re-Imagen and DreamBooth, especially on the subject and text alignment aspects.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 31, 2023

MACE-Dance: Motion-Appearance Cascaded Experts for Music-Driven Dance Video Generation

With the rise of online dance-video platforms and rapid advances in AI-generated content (AIGC), music-driven dance generation has emerged as a compelling research direction. Despite substantial progress in related domains such as music-driven 3D dance generation, pose-driven image animation, and audio-driven talking-head synthesis, existing methods cannot be directly adapted to this task. Moreover, the limited studies in this area still struggle to jointly achieve high-quality visual appearance and realistic human motion. Accordingly, we present MACE-Dance, a music-driven dance video generation framework with cascaded Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). The Motion Expert performs music-to-3D motion generation while enforcing kinematic plausibility and artistic expressiveness, whereas the Appearance Expert carries out motion- and reference-conditioned video synthesis, preserving visual identity with spatiotemporal coherence. Specifically, the Motion Expert adopts a diffusion model with a BiMamba-Transformer hybrid architecture and a Guidance-Free Training (GFT) strategy, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 3D dance generation. The Appearance Expert employs a decoupled kinematic-aesthetic fine-tuning strategy, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in pose-driven image animation. To better benchmark this task, we curate a large-scale and diverse dataset and design a motion-appearance evaluation protocol. Based on this protocol, MACE-Dance also achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/MACE-Dance.

GD-ML AMAP-ML
·
May 6 3

AesopAgent: Agent-driven Evolutionary System on Story-to-Video Production

The Agent and AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technologies have recently made significant progress. We propose AesopAgent, an Agent-driven Evolutionary System on Story-to-Video Production. AesopAgent is a practical application of agent technology for multimodal content generation. The system integrates multiple generative capabilities within a unified framework, so that individual users can leverage these modules easily. This innovative system would convert user story proposals into scripts, images, and audio, and then integrate these multimodal contents into videos. Additionally, the animating units (e.g., Gen-2 and Sora) could make the videos more infectious. The AesopAgent system could orchestrate task workflow for video generation, ensuring that the generated video is both rich in content and coherent. This system mainly contains two layers, i.e., the Horizontal Layer and the Utility Layer. In the Horizontal Layer, we introduce a novel RAG-based evolutionary system that optimizes the whole video generation workflow and the steps within the workflow. It continuously evolves and iteratively optimizes workflow by accumulating expert experience and professional knowledge, including optimizing the LLM prompts and utilities usage. The Utility Layer provides multiple utilities, leading to consistent image generation that is visually coherent in terms of composition, characters, and style. Meanwhile, it provides audio and special effects, integrating them into expressive and logically arranged videos. Overall, our AesopAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with many previous works in visual storytelling. Our AesopAgent is designed for convenient service for individual users, which is available on the following page: https://aesopai.github.io/.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 11, 2024

FantasyTalking2: Timestep-Layer Adaptive Preference Optimization for Audio-Driven Portrait Animation

Recent advances in audio-driven portrait animation have demonstrated impressive capabilities. However, existing methods struggle to align with fine-grained human preferences across multiple dimensions, such as motion naturalness, lip-sync accuracy, and visual quality. This is due to the difficulty of optimizing among competing preference objectives, which often conflict with one another, and the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality datasets with multidimensional preference annotations. To address these, we first introduce Talking-Critic, a multimodal reward model that learns human-aligned reward functions to quantify how well generated videos satisfy multidimensional expectations. Leveraging this model, we curate Talking-NSQ, a large-scale multidimensional human preference dataset containing 410K preference pairs. Finally, we propose Timestep-Layer adaptive multi-expert Preference Optimization (TLPO), a novel framework for aligning diffusion-based portrait animation models with fine-grained, multidimensional preferences. TLPO decouples preferences into specialized expert modules, which are then fused across timesteps and network layers, enabling comprehensive, fine-grained enhancement across all dimensions without mutual interference. Experiments demonstrate that Talking-Critic significantly outperforms existing methods in aligning with human preference ratings. Meanwhile, TLPO achieves substantial improvements over baseline models in lip-sync accuracy, motion naturalness, and visual quality, exhibiting superior performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Ours project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/fantasy-talking2/

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025 2

AI-Driven Scholarly Peer Review via Persistent Workflow Prompting, Meta-Prompting, and Meta-Reasoning

Critical peer review of scientific manuscripts presents a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), partly due to data limitations and the complexity of expert reasoning. This report introduces Persistent Workflow Prompting (PWP), a potentially broadly applicable prompt engineering methodology designed to bridge this gap using standard LLM chat interfaces (zero-code, no APIs). We present a proof-of-concept PWP prompt for the critical analysis of experimental chemistry manuscripts, featuring a hierarchical, modular architecture (structured via Markdown) that defines detailed analysis workflows. We develop this PWP prompt through iterative application of meta-prompting techniques and meta-reasoning aimed at systematically codifying expert review workflows, including tacit knowledge. Submitted once at the start of a session, this PWP prompt equips the LLM with persistent workflows triggered by subsequent queries, guiding modern reasoning LLMs through systematic, multimodal evaluations. Demonstrations show the PWP-guided LLM identifying major methodological flaws in a test case while mitigating LLM input bias and performing complex tasks, including distinguishing claims from evidence, integrating text/photo/figure analysis to infer parameters, executing quantitative feasibility checks, comparing estimates against claims, and assessing a priori plausibility. To ensure transparency and facilitate replication, we provide full prompts, detailed demonstration analyses, and logs of interactive chats as supplementary resources. Beyond the specific application, this work offers insights into the meta-development process itself, highlighting the potential of PWP, informed by detailed workflow formalization, to enable sophisticated analysis using readily available LLMs for complex scientific tasks.

  • 1 authors
·
May 6, 2025 2

FastUMI-100K: Advancing Data-driven Robotic Manipulation with a Large-scale UMI-style Dataset

Data-driven robotic manipulation learning depends on large-scale, high-quality expert demonstration datasets. However, existing datasets, which primarily rely on human teleoperated robot collection, are limited in terms of scalability, trajectory smoothness, and applicability across different robotic embodiments in real-world environments. In this paper, we present FastUMI-100K, a large-scale UMI-style multimodal demonstration dataset, designed to overcome these limitations and meet the growing complexity of real-world manipulation tasks. Collected by FastUMI, a novel robotic system featuring a modular, hardware-decoupled mechanical design and an integrated lightweight tracking system, FastUMI-100K offers a more scalable, flexible, and adaptable solution to fulfill the diverse requirements of real-world robot demonstration data. Specifically, FastUMI-100K contains over 100K+ demonstration trajectories collected across representative household environments, covering 54 tasks and hundreds of object types. Our dataset integrates multimodal streams, including end-effector states, multi-view wrist-mounted fisheye images and textual annotations. Each trajectory has a length ranging from 120 to 500 frames. Experimental results demonstrate that FastUMI-100K enables high policy success rates across various baseline algorithms, confirming its robustness, adaptability, and real-world applicability for solving complex, dynamic manipulation challenges. The source code and dataset will be released in this link https://github.com/MrKeee/FastUMI-100K.

  • 17 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

MM-DREX: Multimodal-Driven Dynamic Routing of LLM Experts for Financial Trading

The inherent non-stationarity of financial markets and the complexity of multi-modal information pose significant challenges to existing quantitative trading models. Traditional methods relying on fixed structures and unimodal data struggle to adapt to market regime shifts, while large language model (LLM)-driven solutions - despite their multi-modal comprehension - suffer from static strategies and homogeneous expert designs, lacking dynamic adjustment and fine-grained decision mechanisms. To address these limitations, we propose MM-DREX: a Multimodal-driven, Dynamically-Routed EXpert framework based on large language models. MM-DREX explicitly decouples market state perception from strategy execution to enable adaptive sequential decision-making in non-stationary environments. Specifically, it (1) introduces a vision-language model (VLM)-powered dynamic router that jointly analyzes candlestick chart patterns and long-term temporal features to allocate real-time expert weights; (2) designs four heterogeneous trading experts (trend, reversal, breakout, positioning) generating specialized fine-grained sub-strategies; and (3) proposes an SFT-RL hybrid training paradigm to synergistically optimize the router's market classification capability and experts' risk-adjusted decision-making. Extensive experiments on multi-modal datasets spanning stocks, futures, and cryptocurrencies demonstrate that MM-DREX significantly outperforms 15 baselines (including state-of-the-art financial LLMs and deep reinforcement learning models) across key metrics: total return, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown, validating its robustness and generalization. Additionally, an interpretability module traces routing logic and expert behavior in real time, providing an audit trail for strategy transparency.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 5, 2025

Knowledge Graph Modeling-Driven Large Language Model Operating System (LLM OS) for Task Automation in Process Engineering Problem-Solving

We present the Process Engineering Operations Assistant (PEOA), an AI-driven framework designed to solve complex problems in the chemical and process industries. The framework employs a modular architecture orchestrated by a meta-agent, which serves as the central coordinator, managing an action generator and instruction-tuned small-scale language models (expert models). The action generator decomposes complex problems into sub-tasks and identifies suitable expert models to execute each, delivering precise solutions for multi-step problem-solving. Key techniques include advanced knowledge modeling using property graphs for improved information retrieval, facilitating more accurate and contextually relevant solutions. Additionally, the framework utilizes a teacher-student transfer-learning approach with GPT-4 (Omni) to fine-tune the action generator and expert models for domain adaptation, alongside an iterative problem-solving mechanism with sophisticated error handling. Custom datasets were developed to evaluate the framework against leading proprietary language models on various engineering tasks. The results demonstrate the framework effectiveness in automating calculations, accelerating prototyping, and providing AI-augmented decision support for industrial processes, marking a significant advancement in process engineering capabilities.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 23, 2024

ExpertLongBench: Benchmarking Language Models on Expert-Level Long-Form Generation Tasks with Structured Checklists

This paper introduces ExpertLongBench, an expert-level benchmark containing 11 tasks from 9 domains that reflect realistic expert workflows and applications. Beyond question answering, the application-driven tasks in ExpertLongBench demand long-form outputs that can exceed 5,000 tokens and strict adherence to domain-specific requirements. Notably, each task in ExpertLongBench includes a rubric, designed or validated by domain experts, to specify task requirements and guide output evaluation. Furthermore, we propose CLEAR, an evaluation framework that supports accurate evaluation of long-form model outputs in our benchmark. To achieve fine-grained, expert-aligned evaluation, CLEAR derives checklists from both model outputs and references by extracting information corresponding to items in the task-specific rubric. Checklist items for model outputs are then compared with corresponding items for reference outputs to assess their correctness, enabling grounded evaluation. We benchmark 11 large language models (LLMs) and analyze components in CLEAR, showing that (1) existing LLMs, with the top performer achieving only a 26.8% F1 score, require significant improvement for expert-level tasks; (2) models can generate content corresponding to the required aspects, though often not accurately; and (3) accurate checklist extraction and comparison in CLEAR can be achieved by open-weight models for more scalable and low-cost usage.

  • 17 authors
·
Jun 1, 2025 2

Large Language Lobotomy: Jailbreaking Mixture-of-Experts via Expert Silencing

The rapid adoption of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures marks a major shift in the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). MoE LLMs improve scaling efficiency by activating only a small subset of parameters per token, but their routing structure introduces new safety attack surfaces. We find that safety-critical behaviors in MoE LLMs (e.g., refusal) are concentrated in a small set of experts rather than being uniformly distributed. Building on this, we propose Large Language Lobotomy (L^3), a training-free, architecture-agnostic attack that compromises safety alignment by exploiting expert routing dynamics. L^3 learns routing patterns that correlate with refusal, attributes safety behavior to specific experts, and adaptively silences the most safety-relevant experts until harmful outputs are produced. We evaluate L^3 on eight state-of-the-art open-source MoE LLMs and show that our adaptive expert silencing increases average attack success from 7.3% to 70.4%, reaching up to 86.3%, outperforming prior training-free MoE jailbreak methods. Moreover, bypassing guardrails typically requires silencing fewer than 20% of layer-wise experts while largely preserving general language utility. These results reveal a fundamental tension between efficiency-driven MoE design and robust safety alignment and motivate distributing safety mechanisms more robustly in future MoE LLMs with architecture- and routing-aware methods.

Thinking Like a Botanist: Challenging Multimodal Language Models with Intent-Driven Chain-of-Inquiry

Vision evaluations are typically done through multi-step processes. In most contemporary fields, experts analyze images using structured, evidence-based adaptive questioning. In plant pathology, botanists inspect leaf images, identify visual cues, infer diagnostic intent, and probe further with targeted questions that adapt to species, symptoms, and severity. This structured probing is crucial for accurate disease diagnosis and treatment formulation. Yet current vision-language models are evaluated on single-turn question answering. To address this gap, we introduce PlantInquiryVQA, a benchmark for studying multi-step, intent-driven visual reasoning in botanical diagnosis. We formalize a Chain of Inquiry framework modeling diagnostic trajectories as ordered question-answer sequences conditioned on grounded visual cues and explicit epistemic intent. We release a dataset of 24,950 expert-curated plant images and 138,068 question-answer pairs annotated with visual grounding, severity labels, and domain-specific reasoning templates. Evaluations on top-tier Multimodal Large Language Models reveal that while they describe visual symptoms adequately, they struggle with safe clinical reasoning and accurate diagnosis. Importantly, structured question-guided inquiry significantly improves diagnostic correctness, reduces hallucination, and increases reasoning efficiency. We hope PlantInquiryVQA serves as a foundational benchmark in advancing research to train diagnostic agents to reason like expert botanists rather than static classifiers.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 21

FDIF: Formula-Driven supervised Learning with Implicit Functions for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Deep learning-based 3D medical image segmentation methods relies on large-scale labeled datasets, yet acquiring such data is difficult due to privacy constraints and the high cost of expert annotation. Formula-Driven Supervised Learning (FDSL) offers an appealing alternative by generating training data and labels directly from mathematical formulas. However, existing voxel-based approaches are limited in geometric expressiveness and cannot synthesize realistic textures. We introduce Formula-Driven supervised learning with Implicit Functions (FDIF), a framework that enables scalable pre-training without using any real data and medical expert annotations. FDIF introduces an implicit-function representation based on signed distance functions (SDFs), enabling compact modeling of complex geometries while exploiting the surface representation of SDFs to support controllable synthesis of both geometric and intensity textures. Across three medical image segmentation benchmarks (AMOS, ACDC, and KiTS) and three architectures (SwinUNETR, nnUNet ResEnc-L, and nnUNet Primus-M), FDIF consistently improves over a formula-driven method, and achieves performance comparable to self-supervised approaches pre-trained on large-scale real datasets. We further show that FDIF pre-training also benefits 3D classification tasks, highlighting implicit-function-based formula supervision as a promising paradigm for data-free representation learning. Code is available at https://github.com/yamanoko/FDIF.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 9

QuarkMedBench: A Real-World Scenario Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel on standardized medical exams, high scores often fail to translate to high-quality responses for real-world medical queries. Current evaluations rely heavily on multiple-choice questions, failing to capture the unstructured, ambiguous, and long-tail complexities inherent in genuine user inquiries. To bridge this gap, we introduce QuarkMedBench, an ecologically valid benchmark tailored for real-world medical LLM assessment. We compiled a massive dataset spanning Clinical Care, Wellness Health, and Professional Inquiry, comprising 20,821 single-turn queries and 3,853 multi-turn sessions. To objectively evaluate open-ended answers, we propose an automated scoring framework that integrates multi-model consensus with evidence-based retrieval to dynamically generate 220,617 fine-grained scoring rubrics (~9.8 per query). During evaluation, hierarchical weighting and safety constraints structurally quantify medical accuracy, key-point coverage, and risk interception, effectively mitigating the high costs and subjectivity of human grading. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated rubrics achieve a 91.8% concordance rate with clinical expert blind audits, establishing highly dependable medical reliability. Crucially, baseline evaluations on this benchmark reveal significant performance disparities among state-of-the-art models when navigating real-world clinical nuances, highlighting the limitations of conventional exam-based metrics. Ultimately, QuarkMedBench establishes a rigorous, reproducible yardstick for measuring LLM performance on complex health issues, while its framework inherently supports dynamic knowledge updates to prevent benchmark obsolescence.

  • 16 authors
·
Mar 13

AdaWorldPolicy: World-Model-Driven Diffusion Policy with Online Adaptive Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Effective robotic manipulation requires policies that can anticipate physical outcomes and adapt to real-world environments. Effective robotic manipulation requires policies that can anticipate physical outcomes and adapt to real-world environments. In this work, we introduce a unified framework, World-Model-Driven Diffusion Policy with Online Adaptive Learning (AdaWorldPolicy) to enhance robotic manipulation under dynamic conditions with minimal human involvement. Our core insight is that world models provide strong supervision signals, enabling online adaptive learning in dynamic environments, which can be complemented by force-torque feedback to mitigate dynamic force shifts. Our AdaWorldPolicy integrates a world model, an action expert, and a force predictor-all implemented as interconnected Flow Matching Diffusion Transformers (DiT). They are interconnected via the multi-modal self-attention layers, enabling deep feature exchange for joint learning while preserving their distinct modularity characteristics. We further propose a novel Online Adaptive Learning (AdaOL) strategy that dynamically switches between an Action Generation mode and a Future Imagination mode to drive reactive updates across all three modules. This creates a powerful closed-loop mechanism that adapts to both visual and physical domain shifts with minimal overhead. Across a suite of simulated and real-robot benchmarks, our AdaWorldPolicy achieves state-of-the-art performance, with dynamical adaptive capacity to out-of-distribution scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 22

Text-driven Adaptation of Foundation Models for Few-shot Surgical Workflow Analysis

Purpose: Surgical workflow analysis is crucial for improving surgical efficiency and safety. However, previous studies rely heavily on large-scale annotated datasets, posing challenges in cost, scalability, and reliance on expert annotations. To address this, we propose Surg-FTDA (Few-shot Text-driven Adaptation), designed to handle various surgical workflow analysis tasks with minimal paired image-label data. Methods: Our approach has two key components. First, Few-shot selection-based modality alignment selects a small subset of images and aligns their embeddings with text embeddings from the downstream task, bridging the modality gap. Second, Text-driven adaptation leverages only text data to train a decoder, eliminating the need for paired image-text data. This decoder is then applied to aligned image embeddings, enabling image-related tasks without explicit image-text pairs. Results: We evaluate our approach to generative tasks (image captioning) and discriminative tasks (triplet recognition and phase recognition). Results show that Surg-FTDA outperforms baselines and generalizes well across downstream tasks. Conclusion: We propose a text-driven adaptation approach that mitigates the modality gap and handles multiple downstream tasks in surgical workflow analysis, with minimal reliance on large annotated datasets. The code and dataset will be released in https://github.com/CAMMA-public/Surg-FTDA

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 16, 2025

SilVar: Speech Driven Multimodal Model for Reasoning Visual Question Answering and Object Localization

Visual Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across tasks, including visual question answering and image captioning. However, most models rely on text-based instructions, limiting their effectiveness in human-machine interactions. Moreover, the quality of language models depends on reasoning and prompting techniques, such as COT, which remain underexplored when using speech instructions. To address these challenges, we propose SilVar, a novel end-to-end multimodal model that uses speech instructions for reasoning in visual question answering. In addition, we investigate reasoning techniques with levels including conversational, simple, and complex speech instruction. SilVar is built upon CLIP, Whisper, and LLaMA 3.1-8B, enabling intuitive interactions by allowing users to provide verbal or text instructions. To this end, we introduce a dataset designed to challenge models with speech-based reasoning tasks for object localization. This dataset enhances the model ability to process and explain visual scenes from spoken input, moving beyond object recognition to reasoning-based interactions. The experiments show that SilVar achieves SOTA performance on the MMMU and ScienceQA benchmarks despite the challenge of speech-based instructions. We believe SilVar will inspire next-generation multimodal reasoning models, toward expert artificial general intelligence. Our code and dataset are available here.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 21, 2024

ShotBench: Expert-Level Cinematic Understanding in Vision-Language Models

Cinematography, the fundamental visual language of film, is essential for conveying narrative, emotion, and aesthetic quality. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong general visual understanding, their proficiency in comprehending the nuanced cinematic grammar embedded within individual shots remains largely unexplored and lacks robust evaluation. This critical gap limits both fine-grained visual comprehension and the precision of AI-assisted video generation. To address this, we introduce ShotBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for cinematic language understanding. It features over 3.5k expert-annotated QA pairs from images and video clips, meticulously curated from over 200 acclaimed (predominantly Oscar-nominated) films and spanning eight key cinematography dimensions. Our evaluation of 24 leading VLMs on ShotBench reveals their substantial limitations: even the top-performing model achieves less than 60% average accuracy, particularly struggling with fine-grained visual cues and complex spatial reasoning. To catalyze advancement in this domain, we construct ShotQA, a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising approximately 70k cinematic QA pairs. Leveraging ShotQA, we develop ShotVL through supervised fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization. ShotVL significantly outperforms all existing open-source and proprietary models on ShotBench, establishing new state-of-the-art performance. We open-source our models, data, and code to foster rapid progress in this crucial area of AI-driven cinematic understanding and generation.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 26, 2025 1

OmniDance: Multimodal Driven Dance Video Generation with Large-scale Internet Data

Music-driven dance video generation aims to synthesize expressive human motion that is temporally aligned with music while maintaining high visual fidelity. Despite recent progress, existing methods still face two key limitations: the lack of large-scale, high-quality dance video datasets, and the absence of principled frameworks for integrating music as a complementary conditioning signal into Video Generation Foundation Models. To address these limitations, we introduce CIPE-Dance, a large-scale Internet-sourced dance video dataset with choreography-informed text annotations, constructed via a progressive expert pipeline. To the best of our knowledge, CIPE-Dance is the largest dataset for dance video generation to date, comprising 300k high-quality clips over 400 hours and covering diverse dancers, environments, and dance genres. We further propose OmniDance, a framework-level recipe for integrating music into a TI2V foundation model without sacrificing its original controllability or visual fidelity. Motivated by the complementary roles of text as low-frequency semantics and music as high-frequency temporal dynamics, OmniDance co-designs a depth-aware specialization architecture, an anchored easy-to-hard curriculum learning strategy, and a modality-specialized time-dependent CFG strategy, enabling unified TI2V, MI2V, and MTI2V generation. Extensive experiments on CIPE-Dance demonstrate that OmniDance achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three tasks and exhibits robust multimodal integration capability. Project is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/OmniDance.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 28

CDRRM: Contrast-Driven Rubric Generation for Reliable and Interpretable Reward Modeling

Reward modeling is essential for aligning Large Language Models(LLMs) with human preferences, yet conventional reward models suffer from poor interpretability and heavy reliance on costly expert annotations. While recent rubric-based approaches enhance evaluation transparency, they lack systematic quality control, yielding noisy and redundant criteria, failing to mitigate persistent biases (e.g., verbosity, position) in LLM evaluators, and creating a scalability-reliability trade-off. To address these limitations, we propose CDRRM (Contrast-Driven Rubric Reward Model), a framework built on a novel Contrast-then-Synthesis paradigm for high-quality rubric generation and guided preference judgment. CDRRM first conducts multi-dimensional contrastive profiling on preference pairs to identify causal discriminative factors, then synthesizes these insights into compact, context-aware rubrics to guide preference judg- ments. Extensive experiments on three authoritative benchmarks (RewardBench, RMBench, RMB) demonstrate that CDRRM achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse domains and effectively mitigates aforementioned evaluation biases. Notably, our approach delivers exceptional data efficiency: training the rubric generator on only 3k high-quality samples empowers a frozen pre-trained judge model to outperform fully fine-tuned baselines. This work offers a scalable, interpretable, and data-efficient path for reward modeling.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 8

The EpiBench Platform to Propel AI/ML-based Epidemic Forecasting: A Prototype Demonstration Reaching Human Expert-level Performance

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant effort has gone into developing ML-driven epidemic forecasting techniques. However, benchmarks do not exist to claim if a new AI/ML technique is better than the existing ones. The "covid-forecast-hub" is a collection of more than 30 teams, including us, that submit their forecasts weekly to the CDC. It is not possible to declare whether one method is better than the other using those forecasts because each team's submission may correspond to different techniques over the period and involve human interventions as the teams are continuously changing/tuning their approach. Such forecasts may be considered "human-expert" forecasts and do not qualify as AI/ML approaches, although they can be used as an indicator of human expert performance. We are interested in supporting AI/ML research in epidemic forecasting which can lead to scalable forecasting without human intervention. Which modeling technique, learning strategy, and data pre-processing technique work well for epidemic forecasting is still an open problem. To help advance the state-of-the-art AI/ML applied to epidemiology, a benchmark with a collection of performance points is needed and the current "state-of-the-art" techniques need to be identified. We propose EpiBench a platform consisting of community-driven benchmarks for AI/ML applied to epidemic forecasting to standardize the challenge with a uniform evaluation protocol. In this paper, we introduce a prototype of EpiBench which is currently running and accepting submissions for the task of forecasting COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US states and We demonstrate that we can utilize the prototype to develop an ensemble relying on fully automated epidemic forecasts (no human intervention) that reaches human-expert level ensemble currently being used by the CDC.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 4, 2021

A Survey of LLM-Driven Penetration Testing: Taxonomy, Co-Evolution, and Open Challenges

Agents4Pentest, an emerging class of LLM-based autonomous penetration testing systems, has become a rapidly growing area in security research. Despite this growth, the field still lacks a unified taxonomy, a systematic understanding of how agent architectures and evaluation benchmarks have co-evolved, and a clear characterization of remaining capability and reliability gaps. This survey addresses these gaps through a systematic analysis of 81 papers between 2023 and 2026. We organize the literature into six categories: evaluation benchmarks, general-purpose systems, domain-specific frameworks, CTF-based systems, defense-oriented research, and surveys. We further trace a four-phase architectural evolution from text-only reasoning agents to agents trained with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), showing that each transition is driven by a distinct capability bottleneck. Our analysis yields several key findings. First, RLVR marks a shift in capability acquisition from imitation of expert demonstrations to reward-driven self-improvement, enabling agents to discover previously undocumented attack strategies. Second, CTF platforms have evolved from evaluation testbeds into dual-purpose infrastructure for both agent evaluation and RL training. Third, domain-specific frameworks improve efficiency through recurring specialization mechanisms, but their gains remain largely confined to narrow task classes and are difficult to compare across domains because existing evaluations rely on different benchmarks. Fourth, the field is expanding beyond offensive automation toward adversarial defense and security compliance. Across these categories, we identify three structurally linked open challenges: evaluation reliability, limited performance on multi-stage attack scenarios, and scarcity of high-quality training data.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 30

Preserving Long-Tailed Expert Information in Mixture-of-Experts Tuning

Despite MoE models leading many benchmarks, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for the MoE architectures remains difficult because its router layers are fragile. Methods such as DenseMixer and ESFT mitigate router collapse with dense mixing or auxiliary load-balancing losses, but these introduce noisy gradients that often degrade performance. In preliminary experiments, we systematically pruned experts and observed that while certain super experts are activated far more frequently, discarding less used experts still leads to notable performance degradation. This suggests that even rarely activated experts encode non-trivial knowledge useful for downstream tasks. Motivated by this, we propose an auxiliary-loss-free MoE SFT framework that combines bias-driven sparsification with always-active gated condenser experts. Rather than enforcing balanced activation across all experts, our method encourages task-relevant experts to remain active while pushing long-tailed experts toward inactivity. The condenser experts provide a persistent, learnable pathway that alleviates gradient starvation and facilitates consolidation of information that would otherwise remain fragmented across sparsely activated experts. Analysis further suggest that this design better preserves long-tailed expert information under sparse routing. Experiments on large-scale MoE models demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art SFT baselines such as DenseMixer and ESFT, achieving average gain of 2.5%+ on both mathematical reasoning and commonsenseQA benchmarks.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 23

TwinRL-VLA: Digital Twin-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Real-World Robotic Manipulation

Despite strong generalization capabilities, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain constrained by the high cost of expert demonstrations and insufficient real-world interaction. While online reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in improving general foundation models, applying RL to VLA manipulation in real-world settings is still hindered by low exploration efficiency and a restricted exploration space. Through systematic real-world experiments, we observe that the effective exploration space of online RL is closely tied to the data distribution of supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Motivated by this observation, we propose TwinRL, a digital twin-real-world collaborative RL framework designed to scale and guide exploration for VLA models. First, a high-fidelity digital twin is efficiently reconstructed from smartphone-captured scenes, enabling realistic bidirectional transfer between real and simulated environments. During the SFT warm-up stage, we introduce an exploration space expansion strategy using digital twins to broaden the support of the data trajectory distribution. Building on this enhanced initialization, we propose a sim-to-real guided exploration strategy to further accelerate online RL. Specifically, TwinRL performs efficient and parallel online RL in the digital twin prior to deployment, effectively bridging the gap between offline and online training stages. Subsequently, we exploit efficient digital twin sampling to identify failure-prone yet informative configurations, which are used to guide targeted human-in-the-loop rollouts on the real robot. In our experiments, TwinRL approaches 100% success in both in-distribution regions covered by real-world demonstrations and out-of-distribution regions, delivering at least a 30% speedup over prior real-world RL methods and requiring only about 20 minutes on average across four tasks.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 9

MLB: A Scenario-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Clinical Applications

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents transformative potential for healthcare, yet practical deployment is hindered by the absence of frameworks that assess real-world clinical utility. Existing benchmarks test static knowledge, failing to capture the dynamic, application-oriented capabilities required in clinical practice. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Medical LLM Benchmark MLB, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating LLMs on both foundational knowledge and scenario-based reasoning. MLB is structured around five core dimensions: Medical Knowledge (MedKQA), Safety and Ethics (MedSE), Medical Record Understanding (MedRU), Smart Services (SmartServ), and Smart Healthcare (SmartCare). The benchmark integrates 22 datasets (17 newly curated) from diverse Chinese clinical sources, covering 64 clinical specialties. Its design features a rigorous curation pipeline involving 300 licensed physicians. Besides, we provide a scalable evaluation methodology, centered on a specialized judge model trained via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on expert annotations. Our comprehensive evaluation of 10 leading models reveals a critical translational gap: while the top-ranked model, Kimi-K2-Instruct (77.3% accuracy overall), excels in structured tasks like information extraction (87.8% accuracy in MedRU), performance plummets in patient-facing scenarios (61.3% in SmartServ). Moreover, the exceptional safety score (90.6% in MedSE) of the much smaller Baichuan-M2-32B highlights that targeted training is equally critical. Our specialized judge model, trained via SFT on a 19k expert-annotated medical dataset, achieves 92.1% accuracy, an F1-score of 94.37%, and a Cohen's Kappa of 81.3% for human-AI consistency, validating a reproducible and expert-aligned evaluation protocol. MLB thus provides a rigorous framework to guide the development of clinically viable LLMs.

  • 23 authors
·
Jan 7

PersonaFuse: A Personality Activation-Driven Framework for Enhancing Human-LLM Interactions

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities across various fields. These developments have led to more direct communication between humans and LLMs in various situations, such as social companionship and psychological support. However, LLMs often exhibit limitations in emotional perception and social competence during real-world conversations. These limitations partly originate from their inability to adapt their communication style and emotional expression to different social and task contexts. In this work, we introduce PersonaFuse, a novel LLM post-training framework that enables LLMs to adapt and express different personalities for varying situations. Inspired by Trait Activation Theory and the Big Five personality model, PersonaFuse employs a Mixture-of-Expert architecture that combines persona adapters with a dynamic routing network, enabling contextual trait expression. Experimental results show that PersonaFuse substantially outperforms baseline models across multiple dimensions of social-emotional intelligence. Importantly, these gains are achieved without sacrificing general reasoning ability or model safety, which remain common limitations of direct prompting and supervised fine-tuning approaches. PersonaFuse also delivers consistent improvements in downstream human-centered applications, such as mental health counseling and review-based customer service. Finally, human preference evaluations against leading LLMs, including GPT-4o and DeepSeek, demonstrate that PersonaFuse achieves competitive response quality despite its comparatively smaller model size. These findings demonstrate that PersonaFuse~offers a theoretically grounded and practical approach for developing social-emotional enhanced LLMs, marking a significant advancement toward more human-centric AI systems.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025

CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison

Large, labeled datasets have driven deep learning methods to achieve expert-level performance on a variety of medical imaging tasks. We present CheXpert, a large dataset that contains 224,316 chest radiographs of 65,240 patients. We design a labeler to automatically detect the presence of 14 observations in radiology reports, capturing uncertainties inherent in radiograph interpretation. We investigate different approaches to using the uncertainty labels for training convolutional neural networks that output the probability of these observations given the available frontal and lateral radiographs. On a validation set of 200 chest radiographic studies which were manually annotated by 3 board-certified radiologists, we find that different uncertainty approaches are useful for different pathologies. We then evaluate our best model on a test set composed of 500 chest radiographic studies annotated by a consensus of 5 board-certified radiologists, and compare the performance of our model to that of 3 additional radiologists in the detection of 5 selected pathologies. On Cardiomegaly, Edema, and Pleural Effusion, the model ROC and PR curves lie above all 3 radiologist operating points. We release the dataset to the public as a standard benchmark to evaluate performance of chest radiograph interpretation models. The dataset is freely available at https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/competitions/chexpert .

  • 20 authors
·
Jan 21, 2019

MetaSynth: Meta-Prompting-Driven Agentic Scaffolds for Diverse Synthetic Data Generation

Recent smaller language models such Phi-3.5 and Phi-4 rely on synthetic data generated using larger Language models. Questions remain about leveraging synthetic data for other use cases, such as adapting LLMs to specific domains. A key limitation of synthetic data is low diversity, which negatively impacts its downstream applicability for improving other models. To address this, we propose MetaSynth, a method for generating synthetic data that enhances diversity through meta-prompting, where a language model orchestrates multiple "expert" LLM agents to collaboratively generate data. Using only 25 million tokens of synthetic data generated with MetaSynth, we successfully adapt a well-trained LLM (Mistral-7B-v0.3) to two specialized domains-Finance and Biomedicine-without compromising the capabilities of the resulting model in general tasks. In addition, we evaluate the diversity of our synthetic data using seven automated metrics, and find that it approaches the diversity of LLM pre-training corpora. Continually pre-training Mistral-7B-v0.3 with MetaSynth notably outperforms the base LLM, showing improvements of up to 4.08% in Finance and 13.75% in Biomedicine. The same model shows degraded performance when trained on data generated using a template prompt, even when the template includes prior generations and varying In-Context exemplars of real data. Our findings suggest that a few million tokens of diverse synthetic data without mixing any real data, is sufficient for effective domain adaptation when using MetaSynth.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 16, 2025 2

SSKG Hub: An Expert-Guided Platform for LLM-Empowered Sustainability Standards Knowledge Graphs

Sustainability disclosure standards (e.g., GRI, SASB, TCFD, IFRS S2) are comprehensive yet lengthy, terminology-dense, and highly cross-referential, hindering structured analysis and downstream use. We present SSKG Hub (Sustainability Standards Knowledge Graph Hub), a research prototype and interactive web platform that transforms standards into auditable knowledge graphs (KGs) through an LLM-centered, expert-guided pipeline. The system integrates automatic standard identification, configurable chunking, standard-specific prompting, robust triple parsing, and provenance-aware Neo4j storage with fine-grained audit metadata. LLM extraction produces a provenance-linked Draft KG, which is reviewed, curated, and formally promoted to a Certified KG through meta-expert adjudication. A role-based governance framework covering read-only guest access, expert review and CRUD operations, meta-expert certification, and administrative oversight ensures traceability and accountability across draft and certified states. Beyond graph exploration and triple-level evidence tracing, SSKG Hub supports cross-KG fusion, KG-driven tasks, and dedicated modules for insights and curated resources. We validate the platform through a comprehensive expert-led KG review case study that demonstrates end-to-end curation and quality assurance. The web application is publicly available at www.sskg-hub.com.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 27

Mixture-of-Experts with Gradient Conflict-Driven Subspace Topology Pruning for Emergent Modularity

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures achieve parameter efficiency through conditional computation, yet contemporary designs suffer from two fundamental limitations: structural parameter isolation that causes catastrophic forgetting, and instruction-overfitting that degrades performance in instruction-free scenarios. We propose CDSP-MoE (Conflict-Driven Subspace Pruning MoE), a framework that addresses these issues through a paradigm shift from isolated expert containers to dynamic expert instantiation within a shared physical subspace. Grounded in the Universal Weight Subspace Hypothesis, CDSP-MoE maintains a super-complete parameter backbone where logical experts are carved out via learnable topology masks. Unlike prior work that uses gradient conflict for token reassignment or optimization surgery, we leverage it as a structural supervisory signal: a Lagged Gradient Game penalizes interfering connections in the shared manifold, enabling the topology to spontaneously prune conflicting pathways and evolve interpretable modular structures. Experimental results demonstrate that CDSP-MoE achieves robust content-driven routing without human-defined task labels, maintaining semantic specialization even under strict blind inference protocols where explicit instructions are absent. Code is available at: https://github.com/konodiodaaaaa1/Conflict-Driven-Subspace-Pruning-Mixture-of-Experts

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 23, 2025

Tether: Autonomous Functional Play with Correspondence-Driven Trajectory Warping

The ability to conduct and learn from interaction and experience is a central challenge in robotics, offering a scalable alternative to labor-intensive human demonstrations. However, realizing such "play" requires (1) a policy robust to diverse, potentially out-of-distribution environment states, and (2) a procedure that continuously produces useful robot experience. To address these challenges, we introduce Tether, a method for autonomous functional play involving structured, task-directed interactions. First, we design a novel open-loop policy that warps actions from a small set of source demonstrations (<=10) by anchoring them to semantic keypoint correspondences in the target scene. We show that this design is extremely data-efficient and robust even under significant spatial and semantic variations. Second, we deploy this policy for autonomous functional play in the real world via a continuous cycle of task selection, execution, evaluation, and improvement, guided by the visual understanding capabilities of vision-language models. This procedure generates diverse, high-quality datasets with minimal human intervention. In a household-like multi-object setup, our method is the first to perform many hours of autonomous multi-task play in the real world starting from only a handful of demonstrations. This produces a stream of data that consistently improves the performance of closed-loop imitation policies over time, ultimately yielding over 1000 expert-level trajectories and training policies competitive with those learned from human-collected demonstrations.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 3

BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science

Data-driven scientific discovery requires the iterative integration of scientific domain knowledge, statistical expertise, and an understanding of data semantics to make nuanced analytical decisions, e.g., about which variables, transformations, and statistical models to consider. LM-based agents equipped with planning, memory, and code execution capabilities have the potential to support data-driven science. However, evaluating agents on such open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. To address these challenges, we present BLADE, a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents' multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. BLADE consists of 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature, with ground truth collected from independent analyses by expert data scientists and researchers. To automatically evaluate agent responses, we developed corresponding computational methods to match different representations of analyses to this ground truth. Though language models possess considerable world knowledge, our evaluation shows that they are often limited to basic analyses. However, agents capable of interacting with the underlying data demonstrate improved, but still non-optimal, diversity in their analytical decision making. Our work enables the evaluation of agents for data-driven science and provides researchers deeper insights into agents' analysis approaches.

  • 16 authors
·
Aug 18, 2024

ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discovery

The advancements of language language models (LLMs) have piqued growing interest in developing LLM-based language agents to automate scientific discovery end-to-end, which has sparked both excitement and skepticism about the true capabilities of such agents. In this work, we argue that for an agent to fully automate scientific discovery, it must be able to complete all essential tasks in the workflow. Thus, we call for rigorous assessment of agents on individual tasks in a scientific workflow before making bold claims on end-to-end automation. To this end, we present ScienceAgentBench, a new benchmark for evaluating language agents for data-driven scientific discovery. To ensure the scientific authenticity and real-world relevance of our benchmark, we extract 102 tasks from 44 peer-reviewed publications in four disciplines and engage nine subject matter experts to validate them. We unify the target output for every task to a self-contained Python program file and employ an array of evaluation metrics to examine the generated programs, execution results, and costs. Each task goes through multiple rounds of manual validation by annotators and subject matter experts to ensure its annotation quality and scientific plausibility. We also propose two effective strategies to mitigate data contamination concerns. Using our benchmark, we evaluate five open-weight and proprietary LLMs, each with three frameworks: direct prompting, OpenHands, and self-debug. Given three attempts for each task, the best-performing agent can only solve 32.4% of the tasks independently and 34.3% with expert-provided knowledge. These results underscore the limited capacities of current language agents in generating code for data-driven discovery, let alone end-to-end automation for scientific research.

  • 20 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 2

OrchMAS: Orchestrated Reasoning with Multi Collaborative Heterogeneous Scientific Expert Structured Agents

Multi-agent large language model frameworks are promising for complex multi step reasoning, yet existing systems remain weak for scientific and knowledge intensive domains due to static prompts and agent roles, rigid workflows, and homogeneous model reliance, leading to poor domain adaptation, limited reasoning flexibility, and high latency on heterogeneous or long-horizon scientific tasks. They also struggle to revise earlier decisions when intermediate reasoning diverges, reducing reliability in structured and calculation heavy settings. To address these limitations, we propose a scientific domain oriented interactive two tier multi model orchestration framework. A dedicated orchestration model analyzes each task, dynamically constructs a domain aware reasoning pipeline, and instantiates specialized expert agents with tailored prompts, while an execution model performs each step under generated role and instruction specifications. The orchestrator iteratively updates the pipeline based on intermediate feedback, enabling dynamic replanning, role reallocation, and prompt refinement across multi turn interactions, strengthening robustness and specialization for scientific reasoning through structured heterogeneous model collaboration. The framework is model agnostic and supports heterogeneous LLM integration with different capacities or costs, enabling flexible performance efficiency trade offs in practical scientific deployments. Experiments show consistent improvements over existing multi agent systems and strong baselines across diverse reasoning and scientific style benchmarks.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 3

AlignHuman: Improving Motion and Fidelity via Timestep-Segment Preference Optimization for Audio-Driven Human Animation

Recent advancements in human video generation and animation tasks, driven by diffusion models, have achieved significant progress. However, expressive and realistic human animation remains challenging due to the trade-off between motion naturalness and visual fidelity. To address this, we propose AlignHuman, a framework that combines Preference Optimization as a post-training technique with a divide-and-conquer training strategy to jointly optimize these competing objectives. Our key insight stems from an analysis of the denoising process across timesteps: (1) early denoising timesteps primarily control motion dynamics, while (2) fidelity and human structure can be effectively managed by later timesteps, even if early steps are skipped. Building on this observation, we propose timestep-segment preference optimization (TPO) and introduce two specialized LoRAs as expert alignment modules, each targeting a specific dimension in its corresponding timestep interval. The LoRAs are trained using their respective preference data and activated in the corresponding intervals during inference to enhance motion naturalness and fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignHuman improves strong baselines and reduces NFEs during inference, achieving a 3.3times speedup (from 100 NFEs to 30 NFEs) with minimal impact on generation quality. Homepage: https://alignhuman.github.io/{https://alignhuman.github.io/}

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

Triad: Empowering LMM-based Anomaly Detection with Vision Expert-guided Visual Tokenizer and Manufacturing Process

Although recent methods have tried to introduce large multimodal models (LMMs) into industrial anomaly detection (IAD), their generalization in the IAD field is far inferior to that for general purposes. We summarize the main reasons for this gap into two aspects. On one hand, general-purpose LMMs lack cognition of defects in the visual modality, thereby failing to sufficiently focus on defect areas. Therefore, we propose to modify the AnyRes structure of the LLaVA model, providing the potential anomalous areas identified by existing IAD models to the LMMs. On the other hand, existing methods mainly focus on identifying defects by learning defect patterns or comparing with normal samples, yet they fall short of understanding the causes of these defects. Considering that the generation of defects is closely related to the manufacturing process, we propose a manufacturing-driven IAD paradigm. An instruction-tuning dataset for IAD (InstructIAD) and a data organization approach for Chain-of-Thought with manufacturing (CoT-M) are designed to leverage the manufacturing process for IAD. Based on the above two modifications, we present Triad, a novel LMM-based method incorporating an expert-guided region-of-interest tokenizer and manufacturing process for industrial anomaly detection. Extensive experiments show that our Triad not only demonstrates competitive performance against current LMMs but also achieves further improved accuracy when equipped with manufacturing processes. Source code, training data, and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/tzjtatata/Triad.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025

Pre-gated MoE: An Algorithm-System Co-Design for Fast and Scalable Mixture-of-Expert Inference

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformers have made significant strides in recent years, the success of which is driven by scaling up their model size. Despite their high algorithmic performance, the computational and memory requirements of LLMs present unprecedented challenges. To tackle the high compute requirements of LLMs, the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture was introduced which is able to scale its model size without proportionally scaling up its computational requirements. Unfortunately, MoE's high memory demands and dynamic activation of sparse experts restrict its applicability to real-world problems. Previous solutions that offload MoE's memory-hungry expert parameters to CPU memory fall short because the latency to migrate activated experts from CPU to GPU incurs high performance overhead. Our proposed Pre-gated MoE system effectively tackles the compute and memory challenges of conventional MoE architectures using our algorithm-system co-design. Pre-gated MoE employs our novel pre-gating function which alleviates the dynamic nature of sparse expert activation, allowing our proposed system to address the large memory footprint of MoEs while also achieving high performance. We demonstrate that Pre-gated MoE is able to improve performance, reduce GPU memory consumption, while also maintaining the same level of model quality. These features allow our Pre-gated MoE system to cost-effectively deploy large-scale LLMs using just a single GPU with high performance.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 23, 2023

Towards Adaptive Continual Model Merging via Manifold-Aware Expert Evolution

Continual Model Merging (CMM) sequentially integrates task-specific models into a unified architecture without intensive retraining. However, existing CMM methods are hindered by a fundamental saturation-redundancy dilemma: backbone-centric approaches face parameter saturation and representation interference within fixed capacities, whereas Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) variants resort to indiscriminate expansion, incurring expert redundancy and a routing bottleneck reliant on additional data-driven optimization. To resolve these challenges, we propose MADE-IT (Manifold-Aware Dynamic Expert Evolution and Implicit rouTing), an adaptive CMM method that orchestrates expert management and activation by grounding intrinsic expert representations in manifold geometry. We introduce a projection-based subspace affinity metric coupled with a distribution-aware adaptive threshold mechanism to guide autonomous expert evolution, harmonizing diversity with architectural parsimony. Furthermore, to bypass parameterized gating networks, we design a data-free and training-free implicit routing mechanism that activates experts via feature-subspace alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MADE-IT consistently outperforms strong baselines in accuracy and robustness across long-horizon and shuffled task sequences, while significantly pruning redundant experts, particularly within generic modules and early layers.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 23

Maestro: Reinforcement Learning to Orchestrate Hierarchical Model-Skill Ensembles

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and modular skills has endowed autonomous agents with increasingly powerful capabilities. Existing frameworks typically rely on monolithic LLMs and fixed logic to interface with these skills. This gives rise to a critical bottleneck: different LLMs offer distinct advantages across diverse domains, yet current frameworks fail to exploit the complementary strengths of models and skills, thereby limiting their performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we present Maestro (Multimodal Agent for Expert-Skill Targeted Reinforced Orchestration), a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-driven orchestration framework that reframes heterogeneous multimodal tasks as a sequential decision-making process over a hierarchical model-skill registry. Rather than consolidating all knowledge into a single model, Maestro trains a lightweight policy to dynamically compose ensembles of frozen expert models and a two-tier skill library, deciding at each step whether to invoke an external expert, which model-skill pair to select, and when to terminate. The policy is optimized via outcome-based RL, requiring no step-level supervision. We evaluate Maestro across ten representative multimodal benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, chart understanding, high-resolution perception, and domain-specific analysis. With only a 4B orchestrator, Maestro achieves an average accuracy of 70.1%, surpassing both GPT-5 (69.3%) and Gemini-2.5-Pro (68.7%). Crucially, the learned coordination policy generalizes to unseen models and skills without retraining: augmenting the registry with out-of-domain experts yields a 59.5% average on four challenging benchmarks, outperforming all closed-source baselines. Maestro further maintains high computational efficiency with low latency. The source code is available at https://github.com/jinyangwu/Maestro.

  • 10 authors
·
May 20 1

Towards Greater Leverage: Scaling Laws for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a dominant architecture for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently by decoupling total parameters from computational cost. However, this decoupling creates a critical challenge: predicting the model capacity of a given MoE configurations (e.g., expert activation ratio and granularity) remains an unresolved problem. To address this gap, we introduce Efficiency Leverage (EL), a metric quantifying the computational advantage of an MoE model over a dense equivalent. We conduct a large-scale empirical study, training over 300 models up to 28B parameters, to systematically investigate the relationship between MoE architectural configurations and EL. Our findings reveal that EL is primarily driven by the expert activation ratio and the total compute budget, both following predictable power laws, while expert granularity acts as a non-linear modulator with a clear optimal range. We integrate these discoveries into a unified scaling law that accurately predicts the EL of an MoE architecture based on its configuration. To validate our derived scaling laws, we designed and trained Ling-mini-beta, a pilot model for Ling-2.0 series with only 0.85B active parameters, alongside a 6.1B dense model for comparison. When trained on an identical 1T high-quality token dataset, Ling-mini-beta matched the performance of the 6.1B dense model while consuming over 7x fewer computational resources, thereby confirming the accuracy of our scaling laws. This work provides a principled and empirically-grounded foundation for the scaling of efficient MoE models.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025

DITING: A Multi-Agent Evaluation Framework for Benchmarking Web Novel Translation

Large language models (LLMs) have substantially advanced machine translation (MT), yet their effectiveness in translating web novels remains unclear. Existing benchmarks rely on surface-level metrics that fail to capture the distinctive traits of this genre. To address these gaps, we introduce DITING, the first comprehensive evaluation framework for web novel translation, assessing narrative and cultural fidelity across six dimensions: idiom translation, lexical ambiguity, terminology localization, tense consistency, zero-pronoun resolution, and cultural safety, supported by over 18K expert-annotated Chinese-English sentence pairs. We further propose AgentEval, a reasoning-driven multi-agent evaluation framework that simulates expert deliberation to assess translation quality beyond lexical overlap, achieving the highest correlation with human judgments among seven tested automatic metrics. To enable metric comparison, we develop MetricAlign, a meta-evaluation dataset of 300 sentence pairs annotated with error labels and scalar quality scores. Comprehensive evaluation of fourteen open, closed, and commercial models reveals that Chinese-trained LLMs surpass larger foreign counterparts, and that DeepSeek-V3 delivers the most faithful and stylistically coherent translations. Our work establishes a new paradigm for exploring LLM-based web novel translation and provides public resources to advance future research.

NextGenWhu CLAIN-WHU
·
Oct 10, 2025 2

LEAP: A closed-loop framework for perovskite precursor additive discovery

Efficient discovery of precursor additives is essential for improving the performance of perovskite solar cells, yet the large chemical space makes conventional trial-and-error screening inefficient. We develop LEAP(LLM-driven Exploration via Active Learning for Perovskites), an expert-in-the-loop closed framework that couples a domain-specialized large language model(LLM) with active learning for iterative additive prioritization. The LLM is trained to extract mechanism-relevant knowledge from the perovskite additive literature and to represent candidate molecules through interpretable descriptors, which are further integrated into a Bayesian optimization workflow for uncertainty-aware prioritization under low-data conditions. Benchmark results on unseen literature show that the domain-specialized model outperforms general-purpose models in mechanism-consistent reasoning. Experimental validation in an expert-in-the-loop proof-of-concept study suggests improved additive prioritization across three screening rounds, leading to average device PCEs of 20.13% and 20.87% for the later-round 6-CDQ- and 2-CNA-treated devices, respectively, compared with 19.25% for the control, with a champion PCE of 21.32%. These results provide preliminary evidence that literature-grounded mechanistic descriptors, when coupled with Bayesian optimization and expert feasibility review, can support mechanism-aware additive prioritization in perovskite photovoltaics.

  • 6 authors
·
May 17

Towards Automated Kernel Generation in the Era of LLMs

The performance of modern AI systems is fundamentally constrained by the quality of their underlying kernels, which translate high-level algorithmic semantics into low-level hardware operations. Achieving near-optimal kernels requires expert-level understanding of hardware architectures and programming models, making kernel engineering a critical but notoriously time-consuming and non-scalable process. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents have opened new possibilities for automating kernel generation and optimization. LLMs are well-suited to compress expert-level kernel knowledge that is difficult to formalize, while agentic systems further enable scalable optimization by casting kernel development as an iterative, feedback-driven loop. Rapid progress has been made in this area. However, the field remains fragmented, lacking a systematic perspective for LLM-driven kernel generation. This survey addresses this gap by providing a structured overview of existing approaches, spanning LLM-based approaches and agentic optimization workflows, and systematically compiling the datasets and benchmarks that underpin learning and evaluation in this domain. Moreover, key open challenges and future research directions are further outlined, aiming to establish a comprehensive reference for the next generation of automated kernel optimization. To keep track of this field, we maintain an open-source GitHub repository at https://github.com/flagos-ai/awesome-LLM-driven-kernel-generation.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 22 3

VisionLaw: Inferring Interpretable Intrinsic Dynamics from Visual Observations via Bilevel Optimization

The intrinsic dynamics of an object governs its physical behavior in the real world, playing a critical role in enabling physically plausible interactive simulation with 3D assets. Existing methods have attempted to infer the intrinsic dynamics of objects from visual observations, but generally face two major challenges: one line of work relies on manually defined constitutive priors, making it difficult to generalize to complex scenarios; the other models intrinsic dynamics using neural networks, resulting in limited interpretability and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose VisionLaw, a bilevel optimization framework that infers interpretable expressions of intrinsic dynamics from visual observations. At the upper level, we introduce an LLMs-driven decoupled constitutive evolution strategy, where LLMs are prompted as a knowledgeable physics expert to generate and revise constitutive laws, with a built-in decoupling mechanism that substantially reduces the search complexity of LLMs. At the lower level, we introduce a vision-guided constitutive evaluation mechanism, which utilizes visual simulation to evaluate the consistency between the generated constitutive law and the underlying intrinsic dynamics, thereby guiding the upper-level evolution. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that VisionLaw can effectively infer interpretable intrinsic dynamics from visual observations. It significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and exhibits strong generalization for interactive simulation in novel scenarios.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

Autonomous Multi-Modal LLM Agents for Treatment Planning in Focused Ultrasound Ablation Surgery

Focused Ultrasound Ablation Surgery (FUAS) has emerged as a promising non-invasive therapeutic modality, valued for its safety and precision. Nevertheless, its clinical implementation entails intricate tasks such as multimodal image interpretation, personalized dose planning, and real-time intraoperative decision-making processes that demand intelligent assistance to improve efficiency and reliability. We introduce FUAS-Agents, an autonomous agent system that leverages the multimodal understanding and tool-using capabilities of large language models (LLMs). By integrating patient profiles and MRI data, FUAS-Agents orchestrates a suite of specialized medical AI tools, including segmentation, treatment dose prediction, and clinical guideline retrieval, to generate personalized treatment plans comprising MRI image, dose parameters, and therapeutic strategies. We evaluate the system in a uterine fibroid treatment scenario. Human assessment by four senior FUAS experts indicates that 82.5%, 82.5%, 87.5%, and 97.5% of the generated plans were rated 4 or above (on a 5-point scale) in terms of completeness, accuracy, fluency, and clinical compliance, respectively. These results demonstrate the potential of LLM-driven agents in enhancing decision-making across complex clinical workflows, and exemplify a translational paradigm that combines general-purpose models with specialized expert systems to solve practical challenges in vertical healthcare domains.

  • 9 authors
·
May 27, 2025

ReplicationBench: Can AI Agents Replicate Astrophysics Research Papers?

Frontier AI agents show increasing promise as scientific research assistants, and may eventually be useful for extended, open-ended research workflows. However, in order to use agents for novel research, we must first assess the underlying faithfulness and correctness of their work. To evaluate agents as research assistants, we introduce ReplicationBench, an evaluation framework that tests whether agents can replicate entire research papers drawn from the astrophysics literature. Astrophysics, where research relies heavily on archival data and computational study while requiring little real-world experimentation, is a particularly useful testbed for AI agents in scientific research. We split each paper into tasks which require agents to replicate the paper's core contributions, including the experimental setup, derivations, data analysis, and codebase. Each task is co-developed with the original paper authors and targets a key scientific result, enabling objective evaluation of both faithfulness (adherence to original methods) and correctness (technical accuracy of results). ReplicationBench is extremely challenging for current frontier language models: even the best-performing language models score under 20%. We analyze ReplicationBench trajectories in collaboration with domain experts and find a rich, diverse set of failure modes for agents in scientific research. ReplicationBench establishes the first benchmark of paper-scale, expert-validated astrophysics research tasks, reveals insights about agent performance generalizable to other domains of data-driven science, and provides a scalable framework for measuring AI agents' reliability in scientific research.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025 1

Multimodal Multitask Representation Learning for Pathology Biobank Metadata Prediction

Metadata are general characteristics of the data in a well-curated and condensed format, and have been proven to be useful for decision making, knowledge discovery, and also heterogeneous data organization of biobank. Among all data types in the biobank, pathology is the key component of the biobank and also serves as the gold standard of diagnosis. To maximize the utility of biobank and allow the rapid progress of biomedical science, it is essential to organize the data with well-populated pathology metadata. However, manual annotation of such information is tedious and time-consuming. In the study, we develop a multimodal multitask learning framework to predict four major slide-level metadata of pathology images. The framework learns generalizable representations across tissue slides, pathology reports, and case-level structured data. We demonstrate improved performance across all four tasks with the proposed method compared to a single modal single task baseline on two test sets, one external test set from a distinct data source (TCGA) and one internal held-out test set (TTH). In the test sets, the performance improvements on the averaged area under receiver operating characteristic curve across the four tasks are 16.48% and 9.05% on TCGA and TTH, respectively. Such pathology metadata prediction system may be adopted to mitigate the effort of expert annotation and ultimately accelerate the data-driven research by better utilization of the pathology biobank.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 17, 2019