Yifan Shen

Yiyou Sun, Xinyang Han, Weichen Zhang et al.

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long-horizon, economically valuable, real-world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 subfields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is 2.6%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP-relevant impact.

Boyi Li, Yifan Shen, Yuanzhe Liu et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in open-vocabulary perceptual tasks, yet their ability to solve complex cognitive problems remains limited, especially when visual details are abstract and require visual memory. Current approaches primarily scale Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in the text space, even when language alone is insufficient for clear and structured reasoning, and largely neglect visual reasoning mechanisms analogous to the human visuospatial sketchpad and visual imagery. To mitigate this deficiency, we introduce Cognitive Supersensing, a novel training paradigm that endows MLLMs with human-like visual imagery capabilities by integrating a Latent Visual Imagery Prediction (LVIP) head that jointly learns sequences of visual cognitive latent embeddings and aligns them with the answer, thereby forming vision-based internal reasoning chains. We further introduce a reinforcement learning stage that optimizes text reasoning paths based on this grounded visual latent. To evaluate the cognitive capabilities of MLLMs, we present CogSense-Bench, a comprehensive visual question answering (VQA) benchmark assessing five cognitive dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MLLMs trained with Cognitive Supersensing significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines on CogSense-Bench and exhibit superior generalization on out-of-domain mathematics and science VQA benchmarks, suggesting that internal visual imagery is potentially key to bridging the gap between perceptual recognition and cognitive understanding. We will open-source the CogSense-Bench and our model weights.

Yuanzhe Liu, Jingyuan Zhu, Yuchen Mo et al.

Recent advancements in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, yet they continue to struggle with long-horizon, multi-step tasks. Existing methods lack internal reasoning mechanisms that can identify task-relevant interaction cues or track progress within a subtask, leading to critical execution errors such as repeated actions, missed steps, and premature termination. To address these challenges, we introduce PALM, a VLA framework that structures policy learning around interaction-centric affordance reasoning and subtask progress cues. PALM distills complementary affordance representations that capture object relevance, contact geometry, spatial placements, and motion dynamics, and serve as task-relevant anchors for visuomotor control. To further stabilize long-horizon execution, PALM predicts continuous within-subtask progress, enabling seamless subtask transitions. Across extensive simulation and real-world experiments, PALM consistently outperforms baselines, achieving a 91.8% success rate on LIBERO-LONG, a 12.5% improvement in average length on CALVIN ABC->D, and a 2x improvement over real-world baselines across three long-horizon generalization settings.

Yifan Shen, Jiateng Liu, Xinzhuo Li et al.

Generative world models have shown promise for simulating dynamic environments, yet egocentric video remains challenging due to rapid viewpoint changes, frequent hand-object interactions, and goal-directed procedures whose evolution depends on latent human intent. Existing approaches either focus on hand-centric instructional synthesis with limited scene evolution, perform static view translation without modeling action dynamics, or rely on dense supervision, such as camera trajectories, long video prefixes, synchronized multicamera capture, etc. In this work, we introduce EgoForge, an egocentric goal-directed world simulator that generates coherent, first-person video rollouts from minimal static inputs: a single egocentric image, a high-level instruction, and an optional auxiliary exocentric view. To improve intent alignment and temporal consistency, we propose VideoDiffusionNFT, a trajectory-level reward-guided refinement that optimizes goal completion, temporal causality, scene consistency, and perceptual fidelity during diffusion sampling. Extensive experiments show EgoForge achieves consistent gains in semantic alignment, geometric stability, and motion fidelity over strong baselines, and robust performance in real-world smart-glasses experiments.

Tianjiao Yu, Xinzhuo Li, Muntasir Wahed et al.

Understanding and generating 3D objects as compositions of meaningful parts is fundamental to human perception and reasoning. However, most text-to-3D methods overlook the semantic and functional structure of parts. While recent part-aware approaches introduce decomposition, they remain largely geometry-focused, lacking semantic grounding and failing to model how parts align with textual descriptions or their inter-part relations. We propose DreamPartGen, a framework for semantically grounded, part-aware text-to-3D generation. DreamPartGen introduces Duplex Part Latents (DPLs) that jointly model each part's geometry and appearance, and Relational Semantic Latents (RSLs) that capture inter-part dependencies derived from language. A synchronized co-denoising process enforces mutual geometric and semantic consistency, enabling coherent, interpretable, and text-aligned 3D synthesis. Across multiple benchmarks, DreamPartGen delivers state-of-the-art performance in geometric fidelity and text-shape alignment.

Boye Niu, Yiliao Song, Kai Lian et al.

Multi-agent frameworks powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great success in automated planning and task execution. However, the effective adjustment of agentic workflows during execution has not been well studied. An effective workflow adjustment is crucial in real-world scenarios, as the initial plan must adjust to unforeseen challenges and changing conditions in real time to ensure the efficient execution of complex tasks. In this paper, we define workflows as an activity-on-vertex (AOV) graph, which allows continuous workflow refinement by LLM agents through dynamic subtask allocation adjustment based on historical performance and previous AOVs. To further enhance framework performance, we emphasize modularity in workflow design based on evaluating parallelism and dependency complexity. With this design, our proposed multi-agent framework achieves efficient concurrent execution of subtasks, effective goal achievement, and enhanced error tolerance. Empirical results across various practical tasks demonstrate significant improvements in the efficiency of multi-agent frameworks through dynamic workflow refinement and modularization. The code is available at: https://github.com/tmllab/2025_ICLR_FLOW.

Eric Xue, Yijiang Li, Haoyang Liu et al.

Dataset distillation (DD) allows datasets to be distilled to fractions of their original size while preserving the rich distributional information, so that models trained on the distilled datasets can achieve a comparable accuracy while saving significant computational loads. Recent research in this area has been focusing on improving the accuracy of models trained on distilled datasets. In this paper, we aim to explore a new perspective of DD. We study how to embed adversarial robustness in distilled datasets, so that models trained on these datasets maintain the high accuracy and meanwhile acquire better adversarial robustness. We propose a new method that achieves this goal by incorporating curvature regularization into the distillation process with much less computational overhead than standard adversarial training. Extensive empirical experiments suggest that our method not only outperforms standard adversarial training on both accuracy and robustness with less computation overhead but is also capable of generating robust distilled datasets that can withstand various adversarial attacks. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/yumozi/GUARD.

Boyang Sun, Ignavier Ng, Guangyi Chen et al.

Identifying the causal relations between interested variables plays a pivotal role in representation learning as it provides deep insights into the dataset. Identifiability, as the central theme of this approach, normally hinges on leveraging data from multiple distributions (intervention, distribution shift, time series, etc.). Despite the exciting development in this field, a practical but often overlooked problem is: what if those distribution shifts happen sequentially? In contrast, any intelligence possesses the capacity to abstract and refine learned knowledge sequentially -- lifelong learning. In this paper, with a particular focus on the nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) framework, we move one step forward toward the question of enabling models to learn meaningful (identifiable) representations in a sequential manner, termed continual causal representation learning. We theoretically demonstrate that model identifiability progresses from a subspace level to a component-wise level as the number of distributions increases. Empirically, we show that our method achieves performance comparable to nonlinear ICA methods trained jointly on multiple offline distributions and, surprisingly, the incoming new distribution does not necessarily benefit the identification of all latent variables.

Yifan Shen, Jiawen Zhang, Jian Xu et al.

While agentic AI and its core multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable promise in language and visual reasoning across domains ranging from daily life to advanced scientific research, a profound gap remains between artificial and human intelligence. Despite the integration of powerful tools and advanced MLLMs, state-of-the-art AI agents frequently fail at foundational, seemingly simple tasks that a child can resolve with ease. Inspired by the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), we introduce ChildAgentEval, the first psychometrically grounded interactive benchmark for evaluating cognitive age alignment in MLLM-based agents. ChildAgentEval systematically compares the reasoning performance of various MLLM-based interactive agents against age-specific human developmental stages, exposing where current agentic AI systems can and cannot simulate age-specific cognitive behavior.

Zongfang Liu, Shengkun Tang, Yifan Shen et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token compute, but the deployment still requires storing all experts, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, which makes pruning outcomes sensitive to the choice of calibration set and adds substantial preprocessing cost. We introduce AIMER (\textbf{A}bsolute mean over root mean square \textbf{IM}portance for \textbf{E}xpert \textbf{R}anking), a simple calibration-free criterion that yields clear within-layer score separation and distinct expert stratification. Across 7B to 30B MoE language models at 25\% and 50\% pruning ratios over 16 benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers competitive or stronger overall performance against state-of-the-art calibration-based expert pruning baselines with only 0.22--1.27 seconds for scoring the experts.

Anglin Liu, Rundong Xue, Xu R. Cao et al.

Medical image segmentation is fundamental for biomedical discovery. Existing methods lack generalizability and demand extensive, time-consuming manual annotation for new clinical application. Here, we propose MedSAM-3, a text promptable medical segmentation model for medical image and video segmentation. By fine-tuning the Segment Anything Model (SAM) 3 architecture on medical images paired with semantic conceptual labels, our MedSAM-3 enables medical Promptable Concept Segmentation (PCS), allowing precise targeting of anatomical structures via open-vocabulary text descriptions rather than solely geometric prompts. We further introduce the MedSAM-3 Agent, a framework that integrates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to perform complex reasoning and iterative refinement in an agent-in-the-loop workflow. Comprehensive experiments across diverse medical imaging modalities, including X-ray, MRI, Ultrasound, CT, and video, demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing specialist and foundation models. We will release our code and model at https://github.com/Joey-S-Liu/MedSAM3.

Guangyi Chen, Yunlong Deng, Peiyuan Zhu et al.

Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims to uncover the data-generating process and identify the underlying causal variables and relations, whose evaluation remains inherently challenging due to the requirement of known ground-truth causal variables and causal structure. Existing evaluations often rely on either simplistic synthetic datasets or downstream performance on real-world tasks, generally suffering a dilemma between realism and evaluative precision. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark for CRL using high-fidelity simulated visual data that retains both realistic visual complexity and, more importantly, access to ground-truth causal generating processes. The dataset comprises around 200 thousand images and 3 million video frames across 24 sub-scenes in four domains: static image generation, dynamic physical simulations, robotic manipulations, and traffic situation analysis. These scenarios range from static to dynamic settings, simple to complex structures, and single to multi-agent interactions, offering a comprehensive testbed that hopefully bridges the gap between rigorous evaluation and real-world applicability. In addition, we provide flexible access to the underlying causal structures, allowing users to modify or configure them to align with the required assumptions in CRL, such as available domain labels, temporal dependencies, or intervention histories. Leveraging this benchmark, we evaluated representative CRL methods across diverse paradigms and offered empirical insights to assist practitioners and newcomers in choosing or extending appropriate CRL frameworks to properly address specific types of real problems that can benefit from the CRL perspective. Welcome to visit our: Project page:https://causal-verse.github.io/, Dataset:https://huggingface.co/CausalVerse.

Yifan Shen, Zihan Zhao, Xiao Xue et al.

With the rise of service computing, cloud computing, and IoT, service ecosystems are becoming increasingly complex. The intricate interactions among intelligent agents make abnormal emergence analysis challenging, as traditional causal methods focus on individual trajectories. Large language models offer new possibilities for Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to reveal agent intentions. However, existing approaches remain limited to microscopic and static analysis. This paper introduces a framework: Emergence Analysis based on Multi-Agent Intention (EAMI), which enables dynamic and interpretable emergence analysis. EAMI first employs a dual-perspective thought track mechanism, where an Inspector Agent and an Analysis Agent extract agent intentions under bounded and perfect rationality. Then, k-means clustering identifies phase transition points in group intentions, followed by a Intention Temporal Emergence diagram for dynamic analysis. The experiments validate EAMI in complex online-to-offline (O2O) service system and the Stanford AI Town experiment, with ablation studies confirming its effectiveness, generalizability, and efficiency. This framework provides a novel paradigm for abnormal emergence and causal analysis in service ecosystems. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EAMI-B085.

Xu Cao, Yifan Shen, Bolin Lai et al.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown great promise in language-guided perceptual tasks such as recognition, segmentation, and object detection. However, their effectiveness in addressing visual cognition problems that require high-level multi-image reasoning and visual working memory is not well-established. One such challenge is matrix reasoning - the cognitive ability to discern relationships among patterns in a set of images and extrapolate to predict subsequent patterns. This skill is crucial during the early neurodevelopmental stages of children. Inspired by the matrix reasoning tasks in Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), we propose a new dataset MaRs-VQA to evaluate the visual cognition capability of MLLMs and compare their performance with existing human visual cognition studies. Based on the training data of MaRs-VQA, we also finetune a baseline model Qwen2-VCog with multi-stage cognition reasoning annotations. Our comparative experiments with different baselines reveal a gap between MLLMs and human intelligence, highlighting the visual cognitive limitations of current MLLMs. We believe that the public release of MaRs-VQA and the Qwen2-VCog baseline model will drive progress toward the next generation of MLLMs with human-like visual cognition abilities. MaRs-VQA is available at huggingface.co/datasets/IrohXu/VCog-Bench. The training code of Qwen2-VCog is available at github.com/IrohXu/Cognition-MLLM.

Xiaowei Zhao, Xianglong Liu, Yifan Shen et al.

Open World Object Detection (OWOD), simulating the real dynamic world where knowledge grows continuously, attempts to detect both known and unknown classes and incrementally learn the identified unknown ones. We find that although the only previous OWOD work constructively puts forward to the OWOD definition, the experimental settings are unreasonable with the illogical benchmark, confusing metric calculation, and inappropriate method. In this paper, we rethink the OWOD experimental setting and propose five fundamental benchmark principles to guide the OWOD benchmark construction. Moreover, we design two fair evaluation protocols specific to the OWOD problem, filling the void of evaluating from the perspective of unknown classes. Furthermore, we introduce a novel and effective OWOD framework containing an auxiliary Proposal ADvisor (PAD) and a Class-specific Expelling Classifier (CEC). The non-parametric PAD could assist the RPN in identifying accurate unknown proposals without supervision, while CEC calibrates the over-confident activation boundary and filters out confusing predictions through a class-specific expelling function. Comprehensive experiments conducted on our fair benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art object detection approaches in terms of both existing and our new metrics. Our benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/RE-OWOD/RE-OWOD.

Jiateng Liu, Rushi Wang, Bingxuan Li et al.

Recent advances have enabled general computer-use agents that interpret screens and execute grounded actions from human instructions, yet they still struggle to generalize to unseen and evolving interfaces. While improving agent capability remains important, agent compatible interface design offers a complementary path by aligning interaction semantics with agent prior knowledge. In this paper, we revisit Nielsen 10 usability heuristics through the lens of computer-use agents, identifying which principles naturally transfer, where implicit design assumptions create agent specific failures, and how safe additive augmentations can improve robustness without harming human usability. To evaluate these ideas, we introduce UI-Verse, a suite of controlled environments built around functionally similar interfaces with different applied heuristics. Experiments show that our augmented heuristics consistently improve task completion and modestly improve efficiency, with combined heuristics yielding further gains. Human studies further show that these designs preserve the original interaction workflow without observable usability regressions. Overall, our findings highlight interface design as a practical complementary avenue for improving the reliability and generalization of computer use agents.

Yifan Shen, Zhengyuan Li, Gang Wang

Segment Anything Models (SAM) have made significant advancements in image segmentation, allowing users to segment target portions of an image with a single click (i.e., user prompt). Given its broad applications, the robustness of SAM against adversarial attacks is a critical concern. While recent works have explored adversarial attacks against a pre-defined prompt/click, their threat model is not yet realistic: (1) they often assume the user-click position is known to the attacker (point-based attack), and (2) they often operate under a white-box setting with limited transferability. In this paper, we propose a more practical region-level attack where attackers do not need to know the precise user prompt. The attack remains effective as the user clicks on any point on the target object in the image, hiding the object from SAM. Also, by adapting a spectrum transformation method, we make the attack more transferable under a black-box setting. Both control experiments and testing against real-world SAM services confirm its effectiveness.

Qun Ma, Xiao Xue, Deyu Zhou et al.

Computational experiments have emerged as a valuable method for studying complex systems, involving the algorithmization of counterfactuals. However, accurately representing real social systems in Agent-based Modeling (ABM) is challenging due to the diverse and intricate characteristics of humans, including bounded rationality and heterogeneity. To address this limitation, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been proposed, enabling agents to possess anthropomorphic abilities such as complex reasoning and autonomous learning. These agents, known as LLM-based Agent, offer the potential to enhance the anthropomorphism lacking in ABM. Nonetheless, the absence of explicit explainability in LLMs significantly hinders their application in the social sciences. Conversely, computational experiments excel in providing causal analysis of individual behaviors and complex phenomena. Thus, combining computational experiments with LLM-based Agent holds substantial research potential. This paper aims to present a comprehensive exploration of this fusion. Primarily, it outlines the historical development of agent structures and their evolution into artificial societies, emphasizing their importance in computational experiments. Then it elucidates the advantages that computational experiments and LLM-based Agents offer each other, considering the perspectives of LLM-based Agent for computational experiments and vice versa. Finally, this paper addresses the challenges and future trends in this research domain, offering guidance for subsequent related studies.

Zijian Li, Yifan Shen, Kaitao Zheng et al.

Temporally causal representation learning aims to identify the latent causal process from time series observations, but most methods require the assumption that the latent causal processes do not have instantaneous relations. Although some recent methods achieve identifiability in the instantaneous causality case, they require either interventions on the latent variables or grouping of the observations, which are in general difficult to obtain in real-world scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose an \textbf{ID}entification framework for instantane\textbf{O}us \textbf{L}atent dynamics (\textbf{IDOL}) by imposing a sparse influence constraint that the latent causal processes have sparse time-delayed and instantaneous relations. Specifically, we establish identifiability results of the latent causal process based on sufficient variability and the sparse influence constraint by employing contextual information of time series data. Based on these theories, we incorporate a temporally variational inference architecture to estimate the latent variables and a gradient-based sparsity regularization to identify the latent causal process. Experimental results on simulation datasets illustrate that our method can identify the latent causal process. Furthermore, evaluations on multiple human motion forecasting benchmarks with instantaneous dependencies indicate the effectiveness of our method in real-world settings.

Zeyu Tang, Zhenhao Chen, Xiangchen Song et al. · stanford

The autoregressive decoding for text generation in large language models (LLMs), while widely used, is inherently suboptimal due to the lack of a built-in mechanism to perform refinement and/or correction of the generated content. In this paper, we consider optimality in terms of the joint probability over the generated response, when jointly considering all tokens at the same time. We theoretically characterize the potential deviation of the autoregressively generated response from its globally optimal counterpart that is of the same length. Our analysis suggests that we need to be cautious when noticeable uncertainty arises during text generation, which may signal the sub-optimality of the generation history. To address the pitfall of autoregressive decoding for text generation, we propose an approach that incorporates a sliding reflection window and a pausing criterion, such that refinement and generation can be carried out interchangeably as the decoding proceeds. Our selective refinement framework strikes a balance between efficiency and optimality, and our extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian et al.

Incorporating external context can significantly enhance the response quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, real-world contexts often mix relevant information with disproportionate inappropriate content, posing reliability risks. How do LLMs process and prioritize mixed context? To study this, we introduce the Poisoned Context Testbed, pairing queries with real-world contexts containing relevant and inappropriate content. Inspired by associative learning in animals, we adapt the Rescorla-Wagner (RW) model from neuroscience to quantify how competing contextual signals influence LLM outputs. Our adapted model reveals a consistent behavioral pattern: LLMs exhibit a strong tendency to incorporate information that is less prevalent in the context. This susceptibility is harmful in real-world settings, where small amounts of inappropriate content can substantially degrade response quality. Empirical evaluations on our testbed further confirm this vulnerability. To tackle this, we introduce RW-Steering, a two-stage finetuning-based approach that enables the model to internally identify and ignore inappropriate signals. Unlike prior methods that rely on extensive supervision across diverse context mixtures, RW-Steering generalizes robustly across varying proportions of inappropriate content. Experiments show that our best fine-tuned model improves response quality by 39.8% and reverses the undesirable behavior curve, establishing RW-Steering as a robust, generalizable context engineering solution for improving LLM safety in real-world use.

Yifan Shen, Yuanzhe Liu, Jingyuan Zhu et al.

Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with fine-grained spatial reasoning, particularly when multi-step logic and precise spatial alignment are required. In this work, we introduce SpatialReasoner-R1, a vision-language reasoning model designed to address these limitations. To construct high-quality supervision for spatial reasoning, we design a Multi-Model Monte Carlo Tree Search (M3CTS) method that generates diverse, logically consistent Long Chain-of-Thought (LongCoT) reasoning trajectories. In addition, we propose fine-grained Direct Preference Optimization (fDPO), which introduces segment-specific preference granularity for descriptive grounding and logical reasoning, guided by a spatial reward mechanism that evaluates candidate responses based on visual consistency, spatial grounding, and logical coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that fDPO achieves an average improvement of 4.1% over standard DPO across spatial quality tasks, and a 9.0% gain in spatial quantity tasks. SpatialReasoner-R1, trained with fDPO, sets a new SoTA on SPATIALRGPT-Bench, outperforming the strongest baseline by 9.8% in average accuracy, while maintaining competitive performance on general vision-language tasks.

Zijian Li, Ruichu Cai, Zhenhui Yang et al.

As environments evolve, temporal distribution shifts can degrade time series forecasting performance. A straightforward solution is to adapt to nonstationary changes while preserving stationary dependencies. Hence, some methods disentangle stationary and nonstationary components by assuming uniform distribution shifts, but it is impractical since when the distribution changes is unknown. To address this challenge, we propose the \textbf{U}nknown \textbf{D}istribution \textbf{A}daptation (\textbf{UDA}) model for nonstationary time series forecasting, which detects when distribution shifts occur and disentangles stationary/nonstationary latent variables, thus enabling adaptation to unknown distribution without assuming a uniform distribution shift. Specifically, under a Hidden Markov assumption of latent environments, we demonstrate that the latent environments are identifiable. Sequentially, we further disentangle stationary/nonstationary latent variables by leveraging the variability of historical information. Based on these theoretical results, we propose a variational autoencoder-based model, which incorporates an autoregressive hidden Markov model to estimate latent environments. Additionally, we further devise the modular prior networks to disentangle stationary/nonstationary latent variables. These two modules realize automatic adaptation and enhance nonstationary forecasting performance. Experimental results on several datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Tianjiao Yu, Xinzhuo Li, Yifan Shen et al.

Recent advances in large multimodal models suggest that explicit reasoning mechanisms play a critical role in improving model reliability, interpretability, and cross-modal alignment. While such reasoning-centric approaches have been proven effective in language and vision tasks, their extension to 3D remains underdeveloped. CoRe3D introduces a unified 3D understanding and generation reasoning framework that jointly operates over semantic and spatial abstractions, enabling high-level intent inferred from language to directly guide low-level 3D content formation. Central to this design is a spatially grounded reasoning representation that decomposes 3D latent space into localized regions, allowing the model to reason over geometry in a compositional and procedural manner. By tightly coupling semantic chain-of-thought inference with structured spatial reasoning, CoRe3D produces 3D outputs that exhibit strong local consistency and faithful alignment with linguistic descriptions.

Zijian Li, Minghao Fu, Junxian Huang et al.

Modeling hierarchical latent dynamics behind time series data is critical for capturing temporal dependencies across multiple levels of abstraction in real-world tasks. However, existing temporal causal representation learning methods fail to capture such dynamics, as they fail to recover the joint distribution of hierarchical latent variables from \textit{single-timestep observed variables}. Interestingly, we find that the joint distribution of hierarchical latent variables can be uniquely determined using three conditionally independent observations. Building on this insight, we propose a Causally Hierarchical Latent Dynamic (CHiLD) identification framework. Our approach first employs temporal contextual observed variables to identify the joint distribution of multi-layer latent variables. Sequentially, we exploit the natural sparsity of the hierarchical structure among latent variables to identify latent variables within each layer. Guided by the theoretical results, we develop a time series generative model grounded in variational inference. This model incorporates a contextual encoder to reconstruct multi-layer latent variables and normalize flow-based hierarchical prior networks to impose the independent noise condition of hierarchical latent dynamics. Empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate our theoretical claims and demonstrate the effectiveness of CHiLD in modeling hierarchical latent dynamics.

Yifan Shen, Yangyang Shu, Hye-young Paik et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models, especially diffusion-based architectures, have significantly improved the visual quality of generated images. However, these models continue to struggle with a critical limitation: maintaining semantic consistency when input prompts undergo minor linguistic variations. Despite being logically equivalent, such prompt pairs often yield misaligned or semantically inconsistent images, exposing a lack of robustness in reasoning and generalisation. To address this, we propose MetaLogic, a novel evaluation framework that detects T2I misalignment without relying on ground truth images. MetaLogic leverages metamorphic testing, generating image pairs from prompts that differ grammatically but are semantically identical. By directly comparing these image pairs, the framework identifies inconsistencies that signal failures in preserving the intended meaning, effectively diagnosing robustness issues in the model's logic understanding. Unlike existing evaluation methods that compare a generated image to a single prompt, MetaLogic evaluates semantic equivalence between paired images, offering a scalable, ground-truth-free approach to identifying alignment failures. It categorises these alignment errors (e.g., entity omission, duplication, positional misalignment) and surfaces counterexamples that can be used for model debugging and refinement. We evaluate MetaLogic across multiple state-of-the-art T2I models and reveal consistent robustness failures across a range of logical constructs. We find that even the SOTA text-to-image models like Flux.dev and DALLE-3 demonstrate a 59 percent and 71 percent misalignment rate, respectively. Our results show that MetaLogic is not only efficient and scalable, but also effective in uncovering fine-grained logical inconsistencies that are overlooked by existing evaluation metrics.

Qun Ma, Xiao Xue, Ming Zhang et al.

Metaverse service is a product of the convergence between Metaverse and service systems, designed to address service-related challenges concerning digital avatars, digital twins, and digital natives within Metaverse. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), agents now play a pivotal role in Metaverse service ecosystem, serving dual functions: as digital avatars representing users in the virtual realm and as service assistants (or NPCs) providing personalized support. However, during the modeling of Metaverse service ecosystems, existing LLM-based agents face significant challenges in bridging virtual-world services with real-world services, particularly regarding issues such as character data fusion, character knowledge association, and ethical safety concerns. This paper proposes an explainable emotion alignment framework for LLM-based agents in Metaverse Service Ecosystem. It aims to integrate factual factors into the decision-making loop of LLM-based agents, systematically demonstrating how to achieve more relational fact alignment for these agents. Finally, a simulation experiment in the Offline-to-Offline food delivery scenario is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this framework, obtaining more realistic social emergence.

Yifan Shen, Peiyuan Zhu, Zijian Li et al. · stanford

Controllable video generation remains a significant challenge, despite recent advances in generating high-quality and consistent videos. Most existing methods for controlling video generation treat the video as a whole, neglecting intricate fine-grained spatiotemporal relationships, which limits both control precision and efficiency. In this paper, we propose Controllable Video Generative Adversarial Networks (CoVoGAN) to disentangle the video concepts, thus facilitating efficient and independent control over individual concepts. Specifically, following the minimal change principle, we first disentangle static and dynamic latent variables. We then leverage the sufficient change property to achieve component-wise identifiability of dynamic latent variables, enabling disentangled control of video generation. To establish the theoretical foundation, we provide a rigorous analysis demonstrating the identifiability of our approach. Building on these theoretical insights, we design a Temporal Transition Module to disentangle latent dynamics. To enforce the minimal change principle and sufficient change property, we minimize the dimensionality of latent dynamic variables and impose temporal conditional independence. To validate our approach, we integrate this module as a plug-in for GANs. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on various video generation benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly improves generation quality and controllability across diverse real-world scenarios.

Yifan Shen, David Yarkony

We present a symmetry adapted residual neural network (SAResNet) diabatization method to construct quasi-diabatic Hamiltonians that accurately represent ab initio adiabatic energies, energy gradients, and nonadiabatic couplings for moderate sized systems. Our symmetry adapted neural network inherits from the pioneering symmetry adapted polynomial and fundamental invariant neural network diabatization methods to exploit the power of neural network along with the transparent symmetry adaptation of polynomial for both symmetric and asymmetric irreducible representations. In addition, our symmetry adaptation provides a unified framework for symmetry adapted polynomial and symmetry adapted neural network, enabling the adoption of the residual neural network architecture, which is a powerful descendant of the pioneering feedforward neural network. Our SAResNet is applied to construct the full 36-dimensional coupled diabatic potential energy surfaces for aniline N-H bond photodissociation, with 2,269 data points and 32,640 trainable parameters and 190 cm-1 root mean square deviation in energy. In addition to the experimentally observed ππ* and πRydberg/πσ* states, a higher state (HOMO - 1 π to Rydberg/σ* excitation) is found to introduce an induced geometric phase effect thus indirectly participate in the photodissociation process.

Guangyi Chen, Yifan Shen, Zhenhao Chen et al.

Identifying the underlying time-delayed latent causal processes in sequential data is vital for grasping temporal dynamics and making downstream reasoning. While some recent methods can robustly identify these latent causal variables, they rely on strict assumptions about the invertible generation process from latent variables to observed data. However, these assumptions are often hard to satisfy in real-world applications containing information loss. For instance, the visual perception process translates a 3D space into 2D images, or the phenomenon of persistence of vision incorporates historical data into current perceptions. To address this challenge, we establish an identifiability theory that allows for the recovery of independent latent components even when they come from a nonlinear and non-invertible mix. Using this theory as a foundation, we propose a principled approach, CaRiNG, to learn the CAusal RepresentatIon of Non-invertible Generative temporal data with identifiability guarantees. Specifically, we utilize temporal context to recover lost latent information and apply the conditions in our theory to guide the training process. Through experiments conducted on synthetic datasets, we validate that our CaRiNG method reliably identifies the causal process, even when the generation process is non-invertible. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach considerably improves temporal understanding and reasoning in practical applications.

Chao Chen, Yifan Shen, Guixiang Ma et al.

Learning to compare two objects are essential in applications, such as digital forensics, face recognition, and brain network analysis, especially when labeled data is scarce and imbalanced. As these applications make high-stake decisions and involve societal values like fairness and transparency, it is critical to explain the learned models. We aim to study post-hoc explanations of Siamese networks (SN) widely used in learning to compare. We characterize the instability of gradient-based explanations due to the additional compared object in SN, in contrast to architectures with a single input instance. We propose an optimization framework that derives global invariance from unlabeled data using self-learning to promote the stability of local explanations tailored for specific query-reference pairs. The optimization problems can be solved using gradient descent-ascent (GDA) for constrained optimization, or SGD for KL-divergence regularized unconstrained optimization, with convergence proofs, especially when the objective functions are nonconvex due to the Siamese architecture. Quantitative results and case studies on tabular and graph data from neuroscience and chemical engineering show that the framework respects the self-learned invariance while robustly optimizing the faithfulness and simplicity of the explanation. We further demonstrate the convergence of GDA experimentally.