Yuting Lin

Kevin Wang, Anna Thöni, Benjamin Kempinski et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as interactive agents, yet their capacity for social and strategic reasoning over extended interaction remains poorly understood. Existing evaluations rely on static vignettes or single-game benchmarks that cannot capture the sustained, multi-faceted reasoning that real-world multi-agent settings demand. We introduce Mindgames, a multi-game arena and evaluation platform for LLM agents that operationalizes complementary reasoning demands relevant to ``theory of mind'': belief attribution under hidden information, opponent modeling through repeated strategic interaction, cooperative inference under knowledge asymmetries, and sustained deception in social deduction. Built on TextArena, Mindgames provides a unified interaction interface, TrueSkill-based rating, and full trajectory logging across four game environments. We instantiate Mindgames through a 2025 competition cycle hosted at a major AI conference, which assessed 944 submitted agents from 76 teams across four games: Colonel Blotto, Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, Codenames, and Secret Mafia. Our analysis surfaces both agent-level and evaluation-level limitations: brittle rule adherence remains a major bottleneck, top-performing systems repeatedly rely on explicit structural scaffolding, and leaderboard validity differs sharply across environments. In particular, failure-heavy environments can reward robustness to opponent errors as much as strategic ability, with Secret Mafia exhibiting a pronounced error-survival confound in this cycle. We release a dataset of 29,571 multi-agent games with turn-level observations, actions, and rewards, together with MG-Ref, a deterministic offline tournament protocol that scores new agents against a frozen reference pool of top-ranked, low-error Stage~II submissions under the same error-attribution lens used in this analysis.

Jibing Gong, Yao Wan, Ye Liu et al.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs), which offer open access and widespread interactive participation through the internet, are quickly becoming the preferred method for online and remote learning. Several MOOC platforms offer the service of course recommendation to users, to improve the learning experience of users. Despite the usefulness of this service, we consider that recommending courses to users directly may neglect their varying degrees of expertise. To mitigate this gap, we examine an interesting problem of concept recommendation in this paper, which can be viewed as recommending knowledge to users in a fine-grained way. We put forward a novel approach, termed HinCRec-RL, for Concept Recommendation in MOOCs, which is based on Heterogeneous Information Networks and Reinforcement Learning. In particular, we propose to shape the problem of concept recommendation within a reinforcement learning framework to characterize the dynamic interaction between users and knowledge concepts in MOOCs. Furthermore, we propose to form the interactions among users, courses, videos, and concepts into a heterogeneous information network (HIN) to learn the semantic user representations better. We then employ an attentional graph neural network to represent the users in the HIN, based on meta-paths. Extensive experiments are conducted on a real-world dataset collected from a Chinese MOOC platform, XuetangX, to validate the efficacy of our proposed HinCRec-RL. Experimental results and analysis demonstrate that our proposed HinCRec-RL performs well when comparing with several state-of-the-art models.

Tiesong Zhao, Yuting Lin, Yiwen Xu et al.

Image Super-Resolution (SR) techniques improve visual quality by enhancing the spatial resolution of images. Quality evaluation metrics play a critical role in comparing and optimizing SR algorithms, but current metrics achieve only limited success, largely due to the lack of large-scale quality databases, which are essential for learning accurate and robust SR quality metrics. In this work, we first build a large-scale SR image database using a novel semi-automatic labeling approach, which allows us to label a large number of images with manageable human workload. The resulting SR Image quality database with Semi-Automatic Ratings (SISAR), so far the largest of SR-IQA database, contains 8,400 images of 100 natural scenes. We train an end-to-end Deep Image SR Quality (DISQ) model by employing two-stream Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for feature extraction, followed by a feature fusion network for quality prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art metrics and achieves promising generalization performance in cross-database tests. The SISAR database and DISQ model will be made publicly available to facilitate reproducible research.