Zixian Ma

Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Jieyu Zhang, Zixian Ma et al. · uw

In the last year alone, a surge of new benchmarks to measure compositional understanding of vision-language models have permeated the machine learning ecosystem. Given an image, these benchmarks probe a model's ability to identify its associated caption amongst a set of compositional distractors. Surprisingly, we find significant biases in all these benchmarks rendering them hackable. This hackability is so dire that blind models with no access to the image outperform state-of-the-art vision-language models. To remedy this rampant vulnerability, we introduce SugarCrepe, a new benchmark for vision-language compositionality evaluation. We employ large language models, instead of rule-based templates used in previous benchmarks, to generate fluent and sensical hard negatives, and utilize an adversarial refinement mechanism to maximally reduce biases. We re-evaluate state-of-the-art models and recently proposed compositionality inducing strategies, and find that their improvements were hugely overestimated, suggesting that more innovation is needed in this important direction. We release SugarCrepe and the code for evaluation at: https://github.com/RAIVNLab/sugar-crepe.

Benlin Liu, Yuhao Dong, Yiqin Wang et al. · deepmind, tsinghua

Multimodal language models (MLLMs) are increasingly being applied in real-world environments, necessitating their ability to interpret 3D spaces and comprehend temporal dynamics. Current methods often rely on specialized architectural designs or task-specific fine-tuning to achieve this. We introduce Coarse Correspondences, a simple lightweight method that enhances MLLMs' spatial-temporal reasoning with 2D images as input, without modifying the architecture or requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Our method uses a lightweight tracking model to identify primary object correspondences between frames in a video or across different image viewpoints, and then conveys this information to MLLMs through visual prompting. We demonstrate that this simple training-free approach brings substantial gains to GPT4-V/O consistently on four benchmarks that require spatial-temporal reasoning, including +20.5\% improvement on ScanQA, +9.7\% on OpenEQA's episodic memory subset, +6.0\% on the long-form video benchmark EgoSchema, and +11\% on the R2R navigation benchmark. Additionally, we show that Coarse Correspondences can also enhance open-source MLLMs' spatial reasoning (by +6.9\% on ScanQA) when applied in both training and inference and that the improvement can generalize to unseen datasets such as SQA3D (+3.1\%). Taken together, we show that Coarse Correspondences effectively and efficiently boosts models' performance on downstream tasks requiring spatial-temporal reasoning.

Zixian Ma, Rose Wang, Li Fei-Fei et al. · stanford, uw

Modern multi-agent reinforcement learning frameworks rely on centralized training and reward shaping to perform well. However, centralized training and dense rewards are not readily available in the real world. Current multi-agent algorithms struggle to learn in the alternative setup of decentralized training or sparse rewards. To address these issues, we propose a self-supervised intrinsic reward ELIGN - expectation alignment - inspired by the self-organization principle in Zoology. Similar to how animals collaborate in a decentralized manner with those in their vicinity, agents trained with expectation alignment learn behaviors that match their neighbors' expectations. This allows the agents to learn collaborative behaviors without any external reward or centralized training. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach across 6 tasks in the multi-agent particle and the complex Google Research football environments, comparing ELIGN to sparse and curiosity-based intrinsic rewards. When the number of agents increases, ELIGN scales well in all multi-agent tasks except for one where agents have different capabilities. We show that agent coordination improves through expectation alignment because agents learn to divide tasks amongst themselves, break coordination symmetries, and confuse adversaries. These results identify tasks where expectation alignment is a more useful strategy than curiosity-driven exploration for multi-agent coordination, enabling agents to do zero-shot coordination.

Michelle S. Lam, Zixian Ma, Anne Li et al. · stanford

Machine learning practitioners often end up tunneling on low-level technical details like model architectures and performance metrics. Could early model development instead focus on high-level questions of which factors a model ought to pay attention to? Inspired by the practice of sketching in design, which distills ideas to their minimal representation, we introduce model sketching: a technical framework for iteratively and rapidly authoring functional approximations of a machine learning model's decision-making logic. Model sketching refocuses practitioner attention on composing high-level, human-understandable concepts that the model is expected to reason over (e.g., profanity, racism, or sarcasm in a content moderation task) using zero-shot concept instantiation. In an evaluation with 17 ML practitioners, model sketching reframed thinking from implementation to higher-level exploration, prompted iteration on a broader range of model designs, and helped identify gaps in the problem formulation$\unicode{x2014}$all in a fraction of the time ordinarily required to build a model.

Christopher Clark, Jieyu Zhang, Zixian Ma et al. · gatech

Today's strongest video-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models either rely on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs, effectively distilling from them, or do not disclose their training data or recipe. As a result, the open-source community lacks the foundations needed to improve on the state-of-the-art video (and image) language models. Crucially, many downstream applications require more than just high-level video understanding; they require grounding -- either by pointing or by tracking in pixels. Even proprietary models lack this capability. We present Molmo2, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art among open-source models and demonstrate exceptional new capabilities in point-driven grounding in single image, multi-image, and video tasks. Our key contribution is a collection of 7 new video datasets and 2 multi-image datasets, including a dataset of highly detailed video captions for pre-training, a free-form video Q&A dataset for fine-tuning, a new object tracking dataset with complex queries, and an innovative new video pointing dataset, all collected without the use of closed VLMs. We also present a training recipe for this data utilizing an efficient packing and message-tree encoding scheme, and show bi-directional attention on vision tokens and a novel token-weight strategy improves performance. Our best-in-class 8B model outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models on short videos, counting, and captioning, and is competitive on long-videos. On video-grounding Molmo2 significantly outperforms existing open-weight models like Qwen3-VL (35.5 vs 29.6 accuracy on video counting) and surpasses proprietary models like Gemini 3 Pro on some tasks (38.4 vs 20.0 F1 on video pointing and 56.2 vs 41.1 J&F on video tracking).

Zixian Ma, Jerry Hong, Mustafa Omer Gul et al. · uw

A fundamental characteristic common to both human vision and natural language is their compositional nature. Yet, despite the performance gains contributed by large vision and language pretraining, we find that: across 7 architectures trained with 4 algorithms on massive datasets, they struggle at compositionality. To arrive at this conclusion, we introduce a new compositionality evaluation benchmark, CREPE, which measures two important aspects of compositionality identified by cognitive science literature: systematicity and productivity. To measure systematicity, CREPE consists of a test dataset containing over $370K$ image-text pairs and three different seen-unseen splits. The three splits are designed to test models trained on three popular training datasets: CC-12M, YFCC-15M, and LAION-400M. We also generate $325K$, $316K$, and $309K$ hard negative captions for a subset of the pairs. To test productivity, CREPE contains $17K$ image-text pairs with nine different complexities plus $183K$ hard negative captions with atomic, swapping and negation foils. The datasets are generated by repurposing the Visual Genome scene graphs and region descriptions and applying handcrafted templates and GPT-3. For systematicity, we find that model performance decreases consistently when novel compositions dominate the retrieval set, with Recall@1 dropping by up to $12\%$. For productivity, models' retrieval success decays as complexity increases, frequently nearing random chance at high complexity. These results hold regardless of model and training dataset size.

Qijia He, Xunmei Liu, Hammaad Memon et al. · allen-ai

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are an essential format for technical illustration and digital design, offering precise resolution independence and flexible semantic editability. In practice, however, original vector source files are frequently lost or inaccessible, leaving only "flat" rasterized versions (e.g., PNG or JPEG) that are difficult to modify or scale. Manually reconstructing these figures is a prohibitively labor-intensive process, requiring specialized expertise to recover the original geometric intent. To bridge this gap, we propose VFIG, a family of Vision-Language Models trained for complex and high-fidelity figure-to-SVG conversion. While this task is inherently data-driven, existing datasets are typically small-scale and lack the complexity of professional diagrams. We address this by introducing VFIG-DATA, a large-scale dataset of 66K high-quality figure-SVG pairs, curated from a diverse mix of real-world paper figures and procedurally generated diagrams. Recognizing that SVGs are composed of recurring primitives and hierarchical local structures, we introduce a coarse-to-fine training curriculum that begins with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to learn atomic primitives and transitions to reinforcement learning (RL) refinement to optimize global diagram fidelity, layout consistency, and topological edge cases. Finally, we introduce VFIG-BENCH, a comprehensive evaluation suite with novel metrics designed to measure the structural integrity of complex figures. VFIG achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models and performs on par with GPT-5.2, achieving a VLM-Judge score of 0.829 on VFIG-BENCH.

Yuetai Li, Yichen Feng, Zhangchen Xu et al.

Current benchmarks for occupational AI agents are scoped primarily by economic values, telling a replacement story. We introduce JobBench, which evaluates AI agents on the workflows that experts identify as high-priority for delegation, empowering humans based on their needs instead of replacing them with GDP value. JobBench covers 130 agentic tasks across 35 occupations. Each task is packaged as a workspace of heterogeneous reference files, requiring the agent to reason through the cluttered information streams of real professional work. Outputs are graded by a fact-anchored chain of rubrics, averaging 35.6 binary criteria per task. We evaluate 36 models; the strongest, Claude Opus~4.7 under Claude Code, reaches only 45.9 %. We hope JobBench shifts the community's target labour-market effect from replacement to enhancement: building agents that do what humans actually want delegated, not only what is most economically valuable.

Jitesh Jain, Jialuo Li, Zixian Ma et al. · gatech

As humans, we are natural any-horizon reasoners, i.e., we can decide whether to iteratively skim long videos or watch short ones in full when necessary for a given task. With this in mind, one would expect video reasoning models to reason flexibly across different durations. However, SOTA models are still trained to predict answers in a single turn while processing a large number of frames, akin to watching an entire long video, requiring significant resources. This raises the question: Is it possible to develop performant any-horizon video reasoning systems? Inspired by human behavior, we first propose SAGE, an agent system that performs multi-turn reasoning on long videos while handling simpler problems in a single turn. Secondly, we introduce an easy synthetic data generation pipeline using Gemini-2.5-Flash to train the orchestrator, SAGE-MM, which lies at the core of SAGE. We further propose an effective RL post-training recipe essential for instilling any-horizon reasoning ability in SAGE-MM. Thirdly, we curate SAGE-Bench with an average duration of greater than 700 seconds for evaluating video reasoning ability in real-world entertainment use cases. Lastly, we empirically validate the effectiveness of our system, data, and RL recipe, observing notable improvements of up to 6.1% on open-ended video reasoning tasks, as well as an impressive 8.2% improvement on videos longer than 10 minutes.

Christopher Clark, Yue Yang, Jae Sung Park et al.

Grounding has become a fundamental capability of vision-language models (VLMs). Most existing VLMs point by generating coordinates as part of their text output, which requires learning a complicated coordinate system and results in a high token count. Instead, we propose a more intuitive pointing mechanism that directly selects the visual tokens that contain the target concept. Our model generates a special pointing token that cross-attends to the input image or video tokens and selects the appropriate one. To make this model more fine-grained, we follow these pointing tokens with an additional special token that selects a fine-grained subpatch within the initially selected region, and then a third token that specifies a location within that subpatch. We further show that performance improves by generating points sequentially in a consistent order, encoding the relative position of the previously selected point, and including a special no-more-points class when selecting visual tokens. Using this method, we set a new state-of-the-art on image pointing (70.7% on PointBench), set a new state-of-the-art among fully open models on GUI pointing (61.1% on ScreenSpotPro), and improve video pointing (59.1% human preference win rate vs. a text coordinate baseline) and tracking (+6.3% gain on Molmo2Track). We additionally show that our method achieves much higher sample efficiency and discuss the qualitative differences that emerge from this design change.

Yinuo Yang, Zixian Ma, Manasi Ganti et al.

We present a discriminative multimodal reward model that scores all candidate responses in a single forward pass. Conventional discriminative reward models evaluate each response independently, requiring multiple forward passes, one for each potential response. Our approach concatenates multiple responses with separator tokens and applies cross-entropy over their scalar scores, enabling direct comparative reasoning and efficient $N$-way preference learning. The multi-response design also yields up to $N\times$ wall-clock speedup and FLOPs reduction over conventional single-response scoring. To enable $N$-way reward evaluation beyond existing pairwise benchmarks, we construct two new benchmarks: (1) MR$^2$Bench-Image contains human-annotated rankings over responses from 8 diverse models; (2) MR$^2$Bench-Video is a large-scale video-based reward benchmark derived from 94K crowdsourced pairwise human judgments over video question-answering spanning 19 models, denoised via preference graph ensemble. Both benchmarks provide 4-response evaluation variants sampled from the full rankings. Built on a 4B vision-language backbone with LoRA fine-tuning and a lightweight MLP value head, our model achieves state-of-the-art results on six multimodal reward benchmarks, including MR$^2$Bench-Image, MR$^2$Bench-Video, and four other existing benchmarks. Our model outperforms existing larger generative and discriminative reward models. We further demonstrate that our reward model, when used in reinforcement learning with GRPO, produces improved policy models that maintain performance across standard multimodal benchmarks while substantially improving open-ended generation quality, outperforming a single-response discriminative reward model (RM) baseline by a large margin in both training stability and open-ended generation quality.

Zixian Ma, Weikai Huang, Jieyu Zhang et al. · uw

Real-world multi-modal problems are rarely solved by a single machine learning model, and often require multi-step computational plans that involve stitching several models. Tool-augmented LLMs hold tremendous promise for automating the generation of such computational plans. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for evaluating LLMs as planners for multi-step multi-modal tasks has prevented a systematic study of planner design decisions. Should LLMs generate a full plan in a single shot or step-by-step? Should they invoke tools directly with Python code or through structured data formats like JSON? Does feedback improve planning? To answer these questions and more, we introduce m&m's: a benchmark containing 4K+ multi-step multi-modal tasks involving 33 tools that include multi-modal models, (free) public APIs, and image processing modules. For each of these task queries, we provide automatically generated plans using this realistic toolset. We further provide a high-quality subset of 1,565 task plans that are human-verified and correctly executable. With m&m's, we evaluate 10 popular LLMs with 2 planning strategies (multi-step vs. step-by-step planning), 2 plan formats (JSON vs. code), and 3 types of feedback (parsing/verification/execution). Finally, we summarize takeaways from our extensive experiments. Our dataset and code are available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/zixianma/mnms) and Github (https://github.com/RAIVNLab/mnms).

Zetong Zhou, Dongping Chen, Zixian Ma et al.

Visual reasoning, a cornerstone of human intelligence, encompasses complex perceptual and logical processes essential for solving diverse visual problems. While advances in computer vision have produced powerful models for various perceptual tasks, leveraging these for general visual reasoning remains challenging. Prior work demonstrates that augmenting LLMs with vision models via supervised finetuning improves performance, but faces key limitations such as expensive data generation, reliance on careful data filtering, and poor generalization. To address these issues, we propose ReVPT to enhance multi-modal LLMs' abilities to reason about and use visual tools through reinforcement learning. We introduce a novel RL algorithm based on GRPO, designed to train models to reason with a suite of four visual tools. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several perception-heavy benchmarks, including SAT, CV-Bench, BLINK and MMStar, significantly outperforming the supervised and text-based RL finetuning baselines. Notably, Our ReVPT-3B and ReVPT-7B outperform the instruct models by 9.03% and 9.44% on CV-Bench. Finally, we bring to the community new insights on RL-based visual tool-usage through extensive ablations. Our code is available at https://github.com/ls-kelvin/REVPT.

Haolin Chen, Deon Metelski, Leon Qi et al.

End-to-end automation of realistic healthcare operations stresses three capabilities underrepresented in current benchmarks: policy density, decisions must be grounded in a large library of medical, insurance, and operational rules; Multi-role composition: a single task requires the agent to play multiple roles with handoffs; and multilateral interaction: intermediate workflow steps are multi-turn dialogs, such as peer-to-peer review and patient outreach. We introduce $χ$-Bench, a benchmark of long-horizon healthcare workflows across three domains: provider prior authorization, payer utilization management, and care management. Each task hands the agent a clinical case in a high-fidelity simulator of 20 healthcare apps exposed via 87 MCP tools, which it must drive to a terminal status through tool calls and writing the role's artifacts, guided by a 1,290+ document managed-care operations handbook skill. Across 30 agent harness/models configurations, the best agent resolves only 28.0% of tasks, no agent clears 20% on strict pass^3, and executing all tasks in a single session slumps the performance to 3.8%. These results raise the hypothesis that similar gaps are likely to surface in other policy-dense, role-composed, irreversible enterprise domains.

Zixian Ma, Jianguo Zhang, Zhiwei Liu et al. · salesforce, stanford

While open-source vision-language models perform well on simple question-answering, they still struggle with complex questions that require both perceptual and reasoning capabilities. We propose LATTE, a family of vision-language models that have LeArned to Think wiTh vision spEcialists. By offloading perception to state-of-the-art vision models, our approach enables vision-language models to focus solely on reasoning over high-quality perceptual information. To train LATTE, we synthesize and filter a large dataset of 293K multi-modal reasoning traces over perceptual outputs of vision specialists. LATTE trained on this data achieves significant 4-5% gains over baselines across 6 benchmarks covering both perception and reasoning abilities. Ablation studies reveal that the effectiveness of multi-modal reasoning traces depends on the data sources, formats, and quality of thoughts.

Jieyu Zhang, Weikai Huang, Zixian Ma et al.

Benchmarks for large multimodal language models (MLMs) now serve to simultaneously assess the general capabilities of models instead of evaluating for a specific capability. As a result, when a developer wants to identify which models to use for their application, they are overwhelmed by the number of benchmarks and remain uncertain about which benchmark's results are most reflective of their specific use case. This paper introduces Task-Me-Anything, a benchmark generation engine which produces a benchmark tailored to a user's needs. Task-Me-Anything maintains an extendable taxonomy of visual assets and can programmatically generate a vast number of task instances. Additionally, it algorithmically addresses user queries regarding MLM performance efficiently within a computational budget. It contains 113K images, 10K videos, 2K 3D object assets, over 365 object categories, 655 attributes, and 335 relationships. It can generate 750M image/video question-answering pairs, which focus on evaluating MLM perceptual capabilities. Task-Me-Anything reveals critical insights: open-source MLMs excel in object and attribute recognition but lack spatial and temporal understanding; each model exhibits unique strengths and weaknesses; larger models generally perform better, though exceptions exist; and GPT4o demonstrates challenges in recognizing rotating/moving objects and distinguishing colors.

Guoyang Zeng, Fanchao Qi, Qianrui Zhou et al.

Textual adversarial attacking has received wide and increasing attention in recent years. Various attack models have been proposed, which are enormously distinct and implemented with different programming frameworks and settings. These facts hinder quick utilization and fair comparison of attack models. In this paper, we present an open-source textual adversarial attack toolkit named OpenAttack to solve these issues. Compared with existing other textual adversarial attack toolkits, OpenAttack has its unique strengths in support for all attack types, multilinguality, and parallel processing. Currently, OpenAttack includes 15 typical attack models that cover all attack types. Its highly inclusive modular design not only supports quick utilization of existing attack models, but also enables great flexibility and extensibility. OpenAttack has broad uses including comparing and evaluating attack models, measuring robustness of a model, assisting in developing new attack models, and adversarial training. Source code and documentation can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/OpenAttack.

Baiqi Li, Zhiqiu Lin, Wenxuan Peng et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in recent visual-question-answering (VQA) benchmarks that evaluate complex visio-linguistic reasoning. However, are these models truly effective? In this work, we show that VLMs still struggle with natural images and questions that humans can easily answer, which we term natural adversarial samples. We also find it surprisingly easy to generate these VQA samples from natural image-text corpora using off-the-shelf models like CLIP and ChatGPT. We propose a semi-automated approach to collect a new benchmark, NaturalBench, for reliably evaluating VLMs with 10,000 human-verified VQA samples. Crucially, we adopt a $\textbf{vision-centric}$ design by pairing each question with two images that yield different answers, preventing blind solutions from answering without using the images. This makes NaturalBench more challenging than previous benchmarks that can be solved with commonsense priors. We evaluate 53 state-of-the-art VLMs on NaturalBench, showing that models like LLaVA-OneVision, Cambrian-1, Llama3.2-Vision, Molmo, Qwen2-VL, and even GPT-4o lag 50%-70% behind human performance (over 90%). We analyze why NaturalBench is hard from two angles: (1) Compositionality: Solving NaturalBench requires diverse visio-linguistic skills, including understanding attribute bindings, object relationships, and advanced reasoning like logic and counting. To this end, unlike prior work that uses a single tag per sample, we tag each NaturalBench sample with 1 to 8 skill tags for fine-grained evaluation. (2) Biases: NaturalBench exposes severe biases in VLMs, as models often choose the same answer regardless of the image. Lastly, we apply our benchmark curation method to diverse data sources, including long captions (over 100 words) and non-English languages like Chinese and Hindi, highlighting its potential for dynamic evaluations of VLMs.

Tanmay Gupta, Piper Wolters, Zixian Ma et al.

Web agents--autonomous systems that navigate and execute tasks on the web on behalf of users--have the potential to transform how people interact with the digital world. However, the most capable web agents today rely on proprietary models with undisclosed training data and recipes, limiting scientific understanding, reproducibility, and community-driven progress. We believe agents for the open web should be built in the open. To this end, we introduce (1) MolmoWebMix, a large and diverse mixture of browser task demonstrations and web-GUI perception data and (2) MolmoWeb, a family of fully open multimodal web agents. Specifically, MolmoWebMix combines over 100K synthetic task trajectories from multiple complementary generation pipelines with 30K+ human demonstrations, atomic web-skill trajectories, and GUI perception data, including referring expression grounding and screenshot question answering. MolmoWeb agents operate as instruction-conditioned visual-language action policies: given a task instruction and a webpage screenshot, they predict the next browser action, requiring no access to HTML, accessibility trees, or specialized APIs. Available in 4B and 8B size, on browser-use benchmarks like WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and DeepShop, MolmoWeb agents achieve state-of-the-art results outperforming similar scale open-weight-only models such as Fara-7B, UI-Tars-1.5-7B, and Holo1-7B. MolmoWeb-8B also surpasses set-of-marks (SoM) agents built on much larger closed frontier models like GPT-4o. We further demonstrate consistent gains through test-time scaling via parallel rollouts with best-of-N selection, achieving 94.7% and 60.5% pass@4 (compared to 78.2% and 35.3% pass@1) on WebVoyager and Online-Mind2Web respectively. We will release model checkpoints, training data, code, and a unified evaluation harness to enable reproducibility and accelerate open research on web agents.

Jieyu Zhang, Le Xue, Linxin Song et al. · salesforce, stanford

With the rise of multimodal applications, instruction data has become critical for training multimodal language models capable of understanding complex image-based queries. Existing practices rely on powerful but costly large language models (LLMs) or multimodal language models (MLMs) to produce instruction data. These are often prone to hallucinations, licensing issues and the generation process is often hard to scale and interpret. In this work, we present a programmatic approach that employs scene graphs as symbolic representations of images and human-written programs to systematically synthesize vision-centric instruction data. Our approach ensures the interpretability and controllability of the data generation process and scales efficiently while maintaining factual accuracy. By implementing a suite of 24 single-image, 14 multi-image instruction generators, and a scene graph generation pipeline, we build a scalable, cost-effective system: ProVision which produces diverse question-answer pairs concerning objects, attributes, relations, depth, etc., for any given image. Applied to Visual Genome and DataComp datasets, we generate over 10 million instruction data points, ProVision-10M, and leverage them in both pretraining and instruction tuning stages of MLMs. When adopted in the instruction tuning stage, our single-image instruction data yields up to a 7% improvement on the 2D split and 8% on the 3D split of CVBench, along with a 3% increase in performance on QBench2, RealWorldQA, and MMMU. Our multi-image instruction data leads to an 8% improvement on Mantis-Eval. Incorporation of our data in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages of xGen-MM-4B leads to an averaged improvement of 1.6% across 11 benchmarks.

Linjie Li, Mahtab Bigverdi, Jiawei Gu et al.

Spatial cognition is essential for human intelligence, enabling problem-solving through visual simulations rather than solely relying on verbal reasoning. However, existing AI benchmarks primarily assess verbal reasoning, neglecting the complexities of non-verbal, multi-step visual simulation. We introduce STARE(Spatial Transformations and Reasoning Evaluation), a benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate multimodal large language models on tasks better solved through multi-step visual simulation. STARE features 4K tasks spanning foundational geometric transformations (2D and 3D), integrated spatial reasoning (cube net folding and tangram puzzles), and real-world spatial reasoning (perspective and temporal reasoning), reflecting practical cognitive challenges like object assembly, mechanical diagram interpretation, and everyday spatial navigation. Our evaluations show that models excel at reasoning over simpler 2D transformations, but perform close to random chance on more complex tasks like 3D cube net folding and tangram puzzles that require multi-step visual simulations. Humans achieve near-perfect accuracy but take considerable time (up to 28.9s) on complex tasks, significantly speeding up (down by 7.5 seconds on average) with intermediate visual simulations. In contrast, models exhibit inconsistent performance gains from visual simulations, improving on most tasks but declining in specific cases like tangram puzzles (GPT-4o, o1) and cube net folding (Claude-3.5, Gemini-2.0 Flash), indicating that models may not know how to effectively leverage intermediate visual information.

Jiyue Jiang, Pengan Chen, Jiuming Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have become important tools in solving biological problems, offering improvements in accuracy and adaptability over conventional methods. Several benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate the performance of these LLMs. However, current benchmarks can hardly evaluate the performance of these models across diverse tasks effectively. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive prompting-based benchmarking framework, termed Bio-benchmark, which includes 30 key bioinformatics tasks covering areas such as proteins, RNA, drugs, electronic health records, and traditional Chinese medicine. Using this benchmark, we evaluate six mainstream LLMs, including GPT-4o and Llama-3.1-70b, etc., using 0-shot and few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) settings without fine-tuning to reveal their intrinsic capabilities. To improve the efficiency of our evaluations, we demonstrate BioFinder, a new tool for extracting answers from LLM responses, which increases extraction accuracy by round 30% compared to existing methods. Our benchmark results show the biological tasks suitable for current LLMs and identify specific areas requiring enhancement. Furthermore, we propose targeted prompt engineering strategies for optimizing LLM performance in these contexts. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations for the development of more robust LLMs tailored for various biological applications. This work offers a comprehensive evaluation framework and robust tools to support the application of LLMs in bioinformatics.

Fucai Ke, Joy Hsu, Zhixi Cai et al.

Compositional visual reasoning has emerged as a key research frontier in multimodal AI, aiming to endow machines with the human-like ability to decompose visual scenes, ground intermediate concepts, and perform multi-step logical inference. While early surveys focus on monolithic vision-language models or general multimodal reasoning, a dedicated synthesis of the rapidly expanding compositional visual reasoning literature is still missing. We fill this gap with a comprehensive survey spanning 2023 to 2025 that systematically reviews 260+ papers from top venues (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, etc.). We first formalize core definitions and describe why compositional approaches offer advantages in cognitive alignment, semantic fidelity, robustness, interpretability, and data efficiency. Next, we trace a five-stage paradigm shift: from prompt-enhanced language-centric pipelines, through tool-enhanced LLMs and tool-enhanced VLMs, to recently minted chain-of-thought reasoning and unified agentic VLMs, highlighting their architectural designs, strengths, and limitations. We then catalog 60+ benchmarks and corresponding metrics that probe compositional visual reasoning along dimensions such as grounding accuracy, chain-of-thought faithfulness, and high-resolution perception. Drawing on these analyses, we distill key insights, identify open challenges (e.g., limitations of LLM-based reasoning, hallucination, a bias toward deductive reasoning, scalable supervision, tool integration, and benchmark limitations), and outline future directions, including world-model integration, human-AI collaborative reasoning, and richer evaluation protocols. By offering a unified taxonomy, historical roadmap, and critical outlook, this survey aims to serve as a foundational reference and inspire the next generation of compositional visual reasoning research.

Jiyue Jiang, Zikang Wang, Yuheng Shan et al.

Large Language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing challenges across diverse domains. Notably, recent studies have demonstrated that large language models significantly enhance the efficiency of biomolecular analysis and synthesis, attracting widespread attention from academics and medicine. In this paper, we systematically investigate the application of prompt-based methods with LLMs to biological sequences, including DNA, RNA, proteins, and drug discovery tasks. Specifically, we focus on how prompt engineering enables LLMs to tackle domain-specific problems, such as promoter sequence prediction, protein structure modeling, and drug-target binding affinity prediction, often with limited labeled data. Furthermore, our discussion highlights the transformative potential of prompting in bioinformatics while addressing key challenges such as data scarcity, multimodal fusion, and computational resource limitations. Our aim is for this paper to function both as a foundational primer for newcomers and a catalyst for continued innovation within this dynamic field of study.

Ziang Li, Manasi Ganti, Zixian Ma et al.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate natural language rationales -- free-form explanations that help improve performance on complex reasoning tasks and enhance interpretability for human users. However, evaluating these rationales remains challenging. While recent work has relied on binary preference judgments from humans or LLM judges, such evaluations are often opaque and coarse-grained, offering limited insight into what makes one rationale better than another. In this work, we rethink preference evaluation for LLM-generated rationales by asking: (1) What attributes define good rationales? (2) Can human preferences be explained by these attributes? (3) Can attribute-based evaluation overcome the limitations of binary comparisons? We identify a set of key rationale attributes from prior literature and assess them using automatic metrics, LLM judgments, and human annotations. We then analyze two standard human preference datasets MT Bench and Chatbot Arena using SHAP to identify which attributes best explain human preference outcomes. Finally, we re-evaluate model-generated rationales using attribute-specific ELO scores, revealing more nuanced model comparisons and insights. Our findings suggest that fine-grained attribute evaluations can better characterize rationale quality and guide future research toward more interpretable and reliable evaluation practices.

Jae Sung Park, Zixian Ma, Linjie Li et al. · uw

Reasoning over visual relationships-spatial, functional, interactional, social, etc.-is considered to be a fundamental component of human cognition. Yet, despite the major advances in visual comprehension in multimodal language models (MLMs), precise reasoning over relationships and their generations remains a challenge. We introduce ROBIN: an MLM instruction-tuned with densely annotated relationships capable of constructing high-quality dense scene graphs at scale. To train ROBIN, we curate SVG, a synthetic scene graph dataset by completing the missing relations of selected objects in existing scene graphs using a teacher MLM and a carefully designed filtering process to ensure high-quality. To generate more accurate and rich scene graphs at scale for any image, we introduce SG-EDIT: a self-distillation framework where GPT-4o further refines ROBIN's predicted scene graphs by removing unlikely relations and/or suggesting relevant ones. In total, our dataset contains 146K images and 5.6M relationships for 2.6M objects. Results show that our ROBIN-3B model, despite being trained on less than 3 million instances, outperforms similar-size models trained on over 300 million instances on relationship understanding benchmarks, and even surpasses larger models up to 13B parameters. Notably, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in referring expression comprehension with a score of 88.9, surpassing the previous best of 87.4. Our results suggest that training on the refined scene graph data is crucial to maintaining high performance across diverse visual reasoning task.

Shannon Zejiang Shen, Valerie Chen, Ken Gu et al. · cmu

Current evaluations of agents remain centered around one-shot task completion, failing to account for the inherently iterative and collaborative nature of many real-world problems, where human goals are often underspecified and evolve. We argue for a shift from building and assessing task completion agents to developing collaborative agents, assessed not only by the quality of their final outputs but by how well they engage with and enhance human effort throughout the problem-solving process. To support this shift, we introduce collaborative effort scaling, a framework that captures how an agent's utility grows with increasing user involvement. Through case studies and simulated evaluations, we show that state-of-the-art agents often underperform in multi-turn, real-world scenarios, revealing a missing ingredient in agent design: the ability to sustain engagement and scaffold user understanding. Collaborative effort scaling offers a lens for diagnosing agent behavior and guiding development toward more effective interactions.

Xin Liu, Yuntao Wang, Sinan Xie et al.

Camera-based contactless photoplethysmography refers to a set of popular techniques for contactless physiological measurement. The current state-of-the-art neural models are typically trained in a supervised manner using videos accompanied by gold standard physiological measurements. However, they often generalize poorly out-of-domain examples (i.e., videos that are unlike those in the training set). Personalizing models can help improve model generalizability, but many personalization techniques still require some gold standard data. To help alleviate this dependency, in this paper, we present a novel mobile sensing system called MobilePhys, the first mobile personalized remote physiological sensing system, that leverages both front and rear cameras on a smartphone to generate high-quality self-supervised labels for training personalized contactless camera-based PPG models. To evaluate the robustness of MobilePhys, we conducted a user study with 39 participants who completed a set of tasks under different mobile devices, lighting conditions/intensities, motion tasks, and skin types. Our results show that MobilePhys significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on-device supervised training and few-shot adaptation methods. Through extensive user studies, we further examine how does MobilePhys perform in complex real-world settings. We envision that calibrated or personalized camera-based contactless PPG models generated from our proposed dual-camera mobile sensing system will open the door for numerous future applications such as smart mirrors, fitness and mobile health applications.