Building on this, we will examine joint text-speech pre-training (Chiu et al., 2022; Bar-rault et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2022) methods, This section will provide a comprehensive look at how state-of-the-art voice-interfaced LLMs (Reid et al., 2024; Chu et al., Current Trends The current work in AI virtual assistants builds upon the voice-only systems of the last decade by leveraging LLMs to significantly improve the coverage and robustness of the spoken language understanding and dialogue state tracking components, in addition to substantial advancements in spoken language generation. It highlights recent advancements in multi-turn dialogue systems, encompassing both LLM-based open-domain dialogue (ODD) and task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, as well as relevant datasets and evaluation metrics.

With the rapid development of the online education and large language model, the existing educational tools still suffer from incomplete service, insufficient performance and weak interactivity in terms of courseware generation, interactive notes and quality assurance of content. In particular, the proposed generative agent EZYer : 1) Teacher Module: Integrating the Text Corpus retrieval and in-depth generation technologies, it automatically generates structured teaching materials and LaTeX Beamer courseware in line with the high school mathematics syllabus and supports user-defined image insertion. 2) Student Module: Throughout the collaborative interaction of the four roles of Teacher, Assistant, Top Student and Struggling Student, Note Taker summarizes and generates academic notes to enhance the depth and interest of learning. 3) Controller: set up keyword filtering system, content scoring system, role co-validation system, and dynamic content correction system. This ensure academic strictness and pedagogical propriety of EZYer inputs and outputs. In order to evaluate EZYer, this paper designs five-dimensional evaluation indexes of content accuracy, knowledge coverage, usability, formatting correctness and visual design and appeal, and scores 100 Beamer and Notes generated by EZYer by five large language models, separately, and the results show that the quality of EZYer-generated content is excellent and has a good application prospect.

The world currently has an abundance of ideas for how to use new LLM agents, and developers seek to rapidly prototype and test new agentic designs. However, executing agents at scale using high-capacity LLMs incurs high inference costs. We propose a simple method for reducing LLM agent inference costs without incurring the development friction costs associated with LLM fine-tuning (long training cycles, optimization hyperparameter tweaking loops) or manual prompt engineering (laborious trial and error). Most importantly, we introduce $\textit{in-context distillation}$, which adapts the idea of knowledge distillation (training a low cost-student model to mimic a high-cost teacher) to an in-context learning setting. Our approach retrieves relevant teacher demonstrations at each agent step and provides them to the student as in-context examples, enabling the student to imitate teacher behavior on-the-fly. We combine in-context distillation with the established idea of $\textit{self-consistency cascades}$ to know when the trust the student. This adaptive strategy realizes the cost benefits of model specialization while preserving the productivity of working with frozen models. On the multi-step embodied reasoning benchmark ALFWorld, our method matches teacher-level accuracy at $\textbf{2.5$\times$ lower cost}$, reducing per-episode costs from \$0.059 to \$0.024. The upfront demonstration cost amortizes after just 843 episodes, yielding cumulative savings exceeding \$34,900 at deployment scale (1M episodes). On AppWorld, a complex agent benchmark requiring multi-step API workflows, we shift the Pareto frontier by achieving a $\textbf{2$\times$ cost reduction}$ at iso-accuracy. By reducing operational costs while maintaining rapid experimentation cycles with frozen models, our approach makes advanced agentic systems economically viable for a broader range of applications.

AI self-evolution has long been envisioned as a path toward superintelligence, where models autonomously acquire, refine, and internalize knowledge from their own learning experiences. Yet in practice, unguided self-evolving systems often plateau quickly or even degrade as training progresses. These failures arise from issues such as concept drift, diversity collapse, and mis-evolution, as models reinforce their own biases and converge toward low-entropy behaviors. To enable models to self-evolve in a stable and controllable manner while minimizing reliance on human supervision, we introduce R-Few, a guided Self-Play Challenger-Solver framework that incorporates lightweight human oversight through in-context grounding and mixed training. At each iteration, the Challenger samples a small set of human-labeled examples to guide synthetic question generation, while the Solver jointly trains on human and synthetic examples under an online, difficulty-based curriculum. Across math and general reasoning benchmarks, R-Few achieves consistent and iterative improvements. For example, Qwen3-8B-Base improves by +3.0 points over R-Zero on math tasks and achieves performance on par with General-Reasoner, despite the latter being trained on 20 times more human data. Ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of grounded challenger training and curriculum-based solver training, and further analysis shows that R-Few mitigates drift, yielding more stable and controllable co-evolutionary dynamics.

Quantum Machine Learning (QML) holds the promise of enhancing machine learning modeling in terms of both complexity and accuracy. A key challenge in this domain is the encoding of input data, which plays a pivotal role in determining the performance of QML models. In this work, we tackle a largely unaddressed aspect of encoding that is unique to QML modeling -- rather than adjusting the ansatz used for encoding, we consider adjusting how data is conveyed to the ansatz. We specifically implement QML pipelines that leverage classical data manipulation (i.e., ordering, selecting, and weighting features) as a preprocessing step, and evaluate if these aspects of encoding can have a significant impact on QML model performance, and if they can be effectively optimized to improve performance. Our experimental results, applied across a wide variety of data sets, ansatz, and circuit sizes, with a representative QML approach, demonstrate that by optimizing how features are encoded in an ansatz we can substantially and consistently improve the performance of QML models, making a compelling case for integrating these techniques in future QML applications. Finally we demonstrate the practical feasibility of this approach by running it using real quantum hardware with 100 qubit circuits and successfully achieving improved QML modeling performance in this case as well.

World models have gained significant attention as a promising approach for autonomous driving. By emulating human-like perception and decision-making processes, these models can predict and adapt to dynamic environments. Existing methods typically map high-dimensional observations into compact latent spaces and learn optimal policies within these latent representations. However, prior work usually jointly learns ego-vehicle dynamics and environmental transition dynamics from the image input, leading to inefficiencies and a lack of robustness to variations in vehicle dynamics. To address these issues, we propose the Vehicle Dynamics embedded Dreamer (VDD) method, which decouples the modeling of ego-vehicle dynamics from environmental transition dynamics. This separation allows the world model to generalize effectively across vehicles with diverse parameters. Additionally, we introduce two strategies to further enhance the robustness of the learned policy: Policy Adjustment during Deployment (PAD) and Policy Augmentation during Training (PAT). Comprehensive experiments in simulated environments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly improves both driving performance and robustness to variations in vehicle dynamics, outperforming existing approaches.

Recent large language models (LLMs) are trained on diverse corpora and tasks, leading them to develop complementary strengths. Multi-agent debate (MAD) has emerged as a popular way to leverage these strengths for robust reasoning, though it has mostly been applied to language-only tasks, leaving its efficacy on multimodal problems underexplored. In this paper, we study MAD for solving vision-and-language reasoning problems. Our setup enables generalizing the debate protocol with heterogeneous experts that possess single- and multi-modal capabilities. To this end, we present Weighted Iterative Society-of-Experts (WISE), a generalized and modular MAD framework that partitions the agents into Solvers, that generate solutions, and Reflectors, that verify correctness, assign weights, and provide natural language feedback. To aggregate the agents' solutions across debate rounds, while accounting for variance in their responses and the feedback weights, we present a modified Dawid-Skene algorithm for post-processing that integrates our two-stage debate model. We evaluate WISE on SMART-840, VisualPuzzles, EvoChart-QA, and a new SMART-840++ dataset with programmatically generated problem instances of controlled difficulty. Our results show that WISE consistently improves accuracy by 2-7% over the state-of-the-art MAD setups and aggregation methods across diverse multimodal tasks and LLM configurations.

With the advancement of natural language generation (NLG) technologies, creative story generation systems have gained increasing attention. However, current systems often fail to accurately translate user intent into satisfactory story outputs due to a lack of fine-grained control and unclear input specifications, limiting their applicability. To address this, we propose TaleFrame, a system that combines large language models (LLMs) with human-computer interaction (HCI) to generate stories through structured information, enabling precise control over the generation process. The innovation of TaleFrame lies in decomposing the story structure into four basic units: entities, events, relationships, and story outline. We leverage the Tinystories dataset, parsing and constructing a preference dataset consisting of 9,851 JSON-formatted entries, which is then used to fine-tune a local Llama model. By employing this JSON2Story approach, structured data is transformed into coherent stories. TaleFrame also offers an intuitive interface that supports users in creating and editing entities and events and generates stories through the structured framework. Users can control these units through simple interactions (e.g., drag-and-drop, attach, and connect), thus influencing the details and progression of the story. The generated stories can be evaluated across seven dimensions (e.g., creativity, structural integrity), with the system providing suggestions for refinement based on these evaluations. Users can iteratively adjust the story until a satisfactory result is achieved. Finally, we conduct quantitative evaluation and user studies that demonstrate the usefulness of TaleFrame. Dataset available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/guodaosun/tale-frame.

Reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for eliciting reasoning and self-correction capabilities in large language models, but its computational expense motivates exploration of alternatives. Inspired by techniques from autonomous driving and robotics, we investigate whether supervised learning with synthetic error injection can induce self-correction abilities in language models. Our approach inserts artificial errors into reasoning chains, masks them, and supervises the model to recognize and correct these mistakes. Despite the intuitive appeal of this method, we find that it fails to significantly improve performance even on simple synthetic tasks across multiple models. Moreover, even when the model catches its own error, it often parrots the original mistake. We find that the distribution shift of synthetic errors to on-policy errors significantly degrades the error-correction capabilities of the fine-tuned model, even with good synthetic coverage of on-policy errors. Our results help explain why on-policy reinforcement learning methods have proven uniquely effective for eliciting self-correction.

Offline Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL), a marriage of federated learning and offline reinforcement learning, has attracted increasing interest recently. Albeit with some advancement, we find that the performance of most existing offline FRL methods drops dramatically when provided with mixed-quality data, that is, the logging behaviors (offline data) are collected by policies with varying qualities across clients. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a new vote-based offline FRL framework, named FOVA. It exploits a \emph{vote mechanism} to identify high-return actions during local policy evaluation, alleviating the negative effect of low-quality behaviors from diverse local learning policies. Besides, building on advantage-weighted regression (AWR), we construct consistent local and global training objectives, significantly enhancing the efficiency and stability of FOVA. Further, we conduct an extensive theoretical analysis and rigorously show that the policy learned by FOVA enjoys strict policy improvement over the behavioral policy. Extensive experiments corroborate the significant performance gains of our proposed algorithm over existing baselines on widely used benchmarks.