When Tools Fail: Benchmarking Dynamic Replanning and Anomaly Recovery in LLM AgentsDongsheng Zhu, Xuchen Ma, Yucheng Shen et al.
Existing benchmarks evaluate Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) in LLMs on idealized ''happy paths'', largely overlooking real-world tool failures. We introduce ToolMaze, a benchmark for dynamic path discovery and error recovery in TIR agents. To separate systematic replanning from blind trial-and-error, ToolMaze adopts a two-dimensional design: DAG-based topological complexity and a $2 \times 2$ taxonomy of tool perturbations (explicit/implicit, transient/permanent). Evaluations show that perturbations degrade performance across nearly all models, with the sharpest drops under implicit semantic failures. Driven by systemic over-trust in corrupted outputs, Perturbation Recovery Rate (PRR) plummets by around 37\% in these scenarios, while complex topologies trap agents in futile trial-and-error loops. Crucially, agentic fault-tolerance improves with model scale $3.66\times$ slower than basic task execution, highlighting dynamic replanning as a distinct bottleneck unaddressed by model scaling or prompting. Data and code are available at https://github.com/Zhudongsheng75/ToolMaze.
10.4CVApr 10
VISOR: Agentic Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Iterative Search and Over-horizon ReasoningYucheng Shen, Jiulong Wu, Jizhou Huang et al.
Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VRAG) empowers Vision-Language Models to retrieve and reason over visually rich documents. To tackle complex queries requiring multi-step reasoning, agentic VRAG systems interleave reasoning with iterative retrieval.. However, existing agentic VRAG faces two critical bottlenecks. (1) Visual Evidence Sparsity: key evidence is scattered across pages yet processed in isolation, hindering cross-page reasoning; moreover, fine-grained intra-image evidence often requires precise visual actions, whose misuse degrades retrieval quality; (2) Search Drift in Long Horizons: the accumulation of visual tokens across retrieved pages dilutes context and causes cognitive overload, leading agents to deviate from their search objective. To address these challenges, we propose VISOR (Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Iterative Search and Over-horizon Reasoning), a unified single-agent framework. VISOR features a structured Evidence Space for progressive cross-page reasoning, coupled with a Visual Action Evaluation and Correction mechanism to manage visual actions. Additionally, we introduce a Dynamic Trajectory with Sliding Window and Intent Injection to mitigate search drift. They anchor the evidence space while discarding earlier raw interactions, preventing context from being overwhelmed by visual tokens. We train VISOR using a Group Relative Policy Optimization-based Reinforcement Learning (GRPO-based RL) pipeline with state masking and credit assignment tailored for dynamic context reconstruction. Extensive experiments on ViDoSeek, SlideVQA, and MMLongBench demonstrate that VISOR achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior efficiency for long-horizon visual reasoning tasks.
8.4CVNov 13, 2025
Facial-R1: Aligning Reasoning and Recognition for Facial Emotion AnalysisJiulong Wu, Yucheng Shen, Lingyong Yan et al.
Facial Emotion Analysis (FEA) extends traditional facial emotion recognition by incorporating explainable, fine-grained reasoning. The task integrates three subtasks: emotion recognition, facial Action Unit (AU) recognition, and AU-based emotion reasoning to model affective states jointly. While recent approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and achieve promising results, they face two critical limitations: (1) hallucinated reasoning, where VLMs generate plausible but inaccurate explanations due to insufficient emotion-specific knowledge; and (2) misalignment between emotion reasoning and recognition, caused by fragmented connections between observed facial features and final labels. We propose Facial-R1, a three-stage alignment framework that effectively addresses both challenges with minimal supervision. First, we employ instruction fine-tuning to establish basic emotional reasoning capability. Second, we introduce reinforcement training guided by emotion and AU labels as reward signals, which explicitly aligns the generated reasoning process with the predicted emotion. Third, we design a data synthesis pipeline that iteratively leverages the prior stages to expand the training dataset, enabling scalable self-improvement of the model. Built upon this framework, we introduce FEA-20K, a benchmark dataset comprising 17,737 training and 1,688 test samples with fine-grained emotion analysis annotations. Extensive experiments across eight standard benchmarks demonstrate that Facial-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in FEA, with strong generalization and robust interpretability.
19.4CLFeb 5, 2025
Improve Decoding Factuality by Token-wise Cross Layer Entropy of Large Language ModelsJialiang Wu, Yi Shen, Sijia Liu et al.
Despite their impressive capacities, Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with the hallucination issue of generating inaccurate or fabricated content even when they possess correct knowledge. In this paper, we extend the exploration of the correlation between hidden-state prediction changes and output factuality into a deeper, token-wise level. Based on the insights , we propose cross-layer Entropy eNhanced Decoding (END), a decoding method that mitigates hallucinations without requiring extra training. END leverages inner probability changes across layers to individually quantify the factual knowledge required for each candidate token, and adjusts the final predicting distribution to prioritize tokens with higher factuality. Experiments on both hallucination and QA benchmarks demonstrate that END significantly enhances the truthfulness and informativeness of generated content while maintaining robust QA accuracy. Moreover, our work provides a deeper perspective on understanding the correlations between inherent knowledge and output factuality.
1.9ROApr 2, 2019
Coordinating Large-Scale Robot Networks with Motion and Communication Uncertainties for Logistics ApplicationsZhe Liu, Hesheng Wang, Shunbo Zhou et al.
In this paper, we focus on the problem of task allocation, cooperative path planning and motion coordination of the large-scale system with thousands of robots, aiming for practical applications in robotic warehouses and automated logistics systems. Particularly, we solve the life-long planning problem and guarantee the coordination performance of large-scale robot network in the presence of robot motion uncertainties and communication failures. A hierarchical planning and coordination structure is presented. The environment is divided into several sectors and a dynamic traffic heat-map is generated to describe the current sector-level traffic flow. In task planning level, a greedy task allocation method is implemented to assign the current task to the nearest free robot and the sector-level path is generated by comprehensively considering the traveling distance, the traffic heat-value distribution and the current robot/communication failures. In motion coordination level, local cooperative A* algorithm is implemented in each sector to generate the collision-free road-level path of each robot in the sector and the rolling planning structure is introduced to solve problems caused by motion and communication uncertainties. The effectiveness and practical applicability of the proposed approach are validated by large-scale simulations with more than one thousand robots and real laboratory experiments.