STEAM education in many parts of the Global South remains abstract and weakly connected to learners sociocultural realities. This study examines how human experts evaluate the capacity of Generative AI (GenAI) to contextualize STEAM instruction in these settings. Using a convergent mixed-methods design grounded in human-centered and culturally responsive pedagogy, four STEAM education experts reviewed standardized Ghana NaCCA lesson plans and GenAI-generated lessons created with a customized Culturally Responsive Lesson Planner (CRLP). Quantitative data were collected with a validated 25-item Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Rubric assessing bias awareness, cultural representation, contextual relevance, linguistic responsiveness, and teacher agency. Qualitative reflections provided additional insight into the pedagogical and cultural dynamics of each lesson. Findings show that GenAI, especially through the CRLP, improved connections between abstract standards and learners lived experiences. Teacher Agency was the strongest domain, while Cultural Representation was the weakest. CRLP-generated lessons were rated as more culturally grounded and pedagogically engaging. However, GenAI struggled to represent Ghana's cultural diversity, often producing surface-level references, especially in Mathematics and Computing. Experts stressed the need for teacher mediation, community input, and culturally informed refinement of AI outputs. Future work should involve classroom trials, broader expert participation, and fine-tuning with Indigenous corpora.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been positioned as having the potential to expand access to health information in the Global South, yet their evaluation remains heavily dependent on benchmarks designed around Western norms. We present insights from a preliminary benchmarking exercise with a chatbot for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) for an underserved community in India. We evaluated using HealthBench, a benchmark for conversational health models by OpenAI. We extracted 637 SRH queries from the dataset and evaluated on the 330 single-turn conversations. Responses were evaluated using HealthBench's rubric-based automated grader, which rated responses consistently low. However, qualitative analysis by trained annotators and public health experts revealed that many responses were actually culturally appropriate and medically accurate. We highlight recurring issues, particularly a Western bias, such as for legal framing and norms (e.g., breastfeeding in public), diet assumptions (e.g., fish safe to eat during pregnancy), and costs (e.g., insurance models). Our findings demonstrate the limitations of current benchmarks in capturing the effectiveness of systems built for different cultural and healthcare contexts. We argue for the development of culturally adaptive evaluation frameworks that meet quality standards while recognizing needs of diverse populations.

A key barrier to the real-world deployment of humanoid robots is the lack of autonomous loco-manipulation skills. W e introduce VIRAL, a visual sim-to-real framework that learns humanoid loco-manipulation entirely in simulation and deploys it zero-shot to real hardware. VIRAL follows a teacher-student design: a privileged RL teacher, operating on full state, learns long-horizon loco-manipulation using a delta action space and reference state initialization. A vision-based student policy is then distilled from the teacher via large-scale simulation with tiled rendering, trained with a mixture of online DAgger and behavior cloning. W e find that compute scale is critical: scaling simulation to tens of GPUs (up to 64) makes both teacher and student training reliable, while low-compute regimes often fail. T o bridge the sim-to-real gap, VIRAL combines large-scale visual domain randomization over lighting, materials, camera parameters, image quality, and sensor delays--with real-to-sim alignment of the dexterous hands and cameras. Deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid, the resulting RGB-based policy performs continuous loco-manipulation for up to 54 cycles, generalizing to diverse spatial and appearance variations without any real-world fine-tuning, and approaching expert-level teleoperation performance. Extensive ablations dissect the key design choices required to make RGB-based humanoid loco-manipulation work in practice.

With the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in perception tasks, enhancing their complex reasoning capabilities has emerged as a critical research focus. Existing models still suffer from challenges such as opaque reasoning paths and insufficient generalization ability. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which has demonstrated significant efficacy in language models by enhancing reasoning transparency and output interpretability, holds promise for improving model reasoning capabilities when extended to the multimodal domain. This paper provides a systematic review centered on "Multimodal Chain-of-Thought" (MCoT). First, it analyzes the background and theoretical motivations for its inception from the perspectives of technical evolution and task demands. Then, it introduces mainstream MCoT methods from three aspects: CoT paradigms, the post-training stage, and the inference stage, while also analyzing their underlying mechanisms. Furthermore, the paper summarizes existing evaluation benchmarks and metrics, and discusses the application scenarios of MCoT. Finally, it analyzes the challenges currently facing MCoT and provides an outlook on its future research directions.

Formative feedback is widely recognized as one of the most effective drivers of student learning, yet it remains difficult to implement equitably at scale. In large or low-resource courses, instructors often lack the time, staffing, and bandwidth required to review and respond to every student reflection, creating gaps in support precisely where learners would benefit most. This paper presents a theory-grounded system that uses five coordinated role-based LLM agents (Evaluator, Equity Monitor, Metacognitive Coach, Aggregator, and Reflexion Reviewer) to score learner reflections with a shared rubric and to generate short, bias-aware, learner-facing comments. The agents first produce structured rubric scores, then check for potentially biased or exclusionary language, add metacognitive prompts that invite students to think about their own thinking, and finally compose a concise feedback message of at most 120 words. The system includes simple fairness checks that compare scoring error across lower and higher scoring learners, enabling instructors to monitor and bound disparities in accuracy. We evaluate the pipeline in a 12-session AI literacy program with adult learners. In this setting, the system produces rubric scores that approach expert-level agreement, and trained graders rate the AI-generated comments as helpful, empathetic, and well aligned with instructional goals. Taken together, these results show that multi-agent LLM systems can deliver equitable, high-quality formative feedback at a scale and speed that would be impossible for human graders alone. More broadly, the work points toward a future where feedback-rich learning becomes feasible for any course size or context, advancing long-standing goals of equity, access, and instructional capacity in education.

Unsupervised skill discovery in reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn diverse behaviors without relying on external rewards. However, current methods often overlook the periodic nature of learned skills, focusing instead on increasing the mutual dependence between states and skills or maximizing the distance traveled in latent space. Considering that many robotic tasks - particularly those involving locomotion - require periodic behaviors across varying timescales, the ability to discover diverse periodic skills is essential. Motivated by this, we propose Periodic Skill Discovery (PSD), a framework that discovers periodic behaviors in an unsupervised manner. The key idea of PSD is to train an encoder that maps states to a circular latent space, thereby naturally encoding periodicity in the latent representation. By capturing temporal distance, PSD can effectively learn skills with diverse periods in complex robotic tasks, even with pixel-based observations. We further show that these learned skills achieve high performance on downstream tasks such as hurdling. Moreover, integrating PSD with an existing skill discovery method offers more diverse behaviors, thus broadening the agent's repertoire. Our code and demos are available at https://jonghaepark.github.io/psd/

We introduce LongCat-Flash-Omni, a state-of-the-art open-source omni-modal model with 560 billion parameters, excelling at real-time audio-visual interaction. By adopting a curriculum-inspired progressive training strategy that transitions from simpler to increasingly complex modality sequence modeling tasks, LongCat-Flash-Omni attains comprehensive multimodal capabilities while maintaining strong unimodal capability. Building upon LongCat-Flash, which adopts a high-performance Shortcut-connected Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with zero-computation experts, LongCat-Flash-Omni integrates efficient multimodal perception and speech reconstruction modules. Despite its immense size of 560B parameters (with 27B activated), LongCat-Flash-Omni achieves low-latency real-time audio-visual interaction. For training infrastructure, we developed a modality-decoupled parallelism scheme specifically designed to manage the data and model heterogeneity inherent in large-scale multimodal training. This innovative approach demonstrates exceptional efficiency by sustaining over 90% of the throughput achieved by text-only training. Extensive evaluations show that LongCat-Flash-Omni achieves state-of-the-art performance on omni-modal benchmarks among open-source models. Furthermore, it delivers highly competitive results across a wide range of modality-specific tasks, including text, image, and video understanding, as well as audio understanding and generation. We provide a comprehensive overview of the model architecture design, training procedures, and data strategies, and open-source the model to foster future research and development in the community.

Computer-using agents (CUAs) must plan task workflows across diverse and evolving applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data. Existing datasets are narrow, static, and costly to annotate, while synthetic data often yields oversimplified or misaligned behaviors. We present Watch & Learn (W&L), a framework that converts readily available Internet videos of human computer use into executable UI trajectories at scale. Instead of directly generating actions or relying on handcrafted heuristics, we cast trajectory annotation as an inverse dynamics problem that predicts user actions from consecutive screen states, which simplifies learning and generalizes across domains. Through a task-aware retrieval and labeling pipeline, W&L yields over 53K high-quality trajectories that enhance CUAs both as in-context exemplars and as supervised training data. On OSWorld, it consistently improves general-purpose and specialized CUAs, while on WindowsAgentArena it achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale models under the 15-step limit. These results show that web-scale human demonstration videos can serve as a practical and scalable foundation for advancing real-world CUAs.

Today's LLM ecosystem comprises a wide spectrum of models that differ in size, capability, and cost. No single model is optimal for all scenarios; hence, LLM routers have become essential for selecting the most appropriate model under varying circumstances. However, the rapid emergence of various routers makes choosing the right one increasingly challenging. To address this problem, we need a comprehensive router comparison and a standardized leaderboard, similar to those available for models. In this work, we introduce RouterArena, the first open platform enabling comprehensive comparison of LLM routers. RouterArena has (1) a principally constructed dataset with broad knowledge domain coverage, (2) distinguishable difficulty levels for each domain, (3) an extensive list of evaluation metrics, and (4) an automated framework for leaderboard updates. Leveraging our framework, we have produced the initial leaderboard with detailed metrics comparison as shown in Figure 1. Our framework for evaluating new routers is on https://github.com/RouteWorks/RouterArena. Our leaderboard is on https://routeworks.github.io/.

Artificial intelligence is simultaneously transforming the production function of human capital in schools and the return to skills in the labor market. We develop a theoretical model to analyze the potential for misallocation when these two forces are considered in isolation. We study an educational planner who observes AI's immediate productivity benefits in teaching specific skills but fails to fully internalize the technology's future wage-suppressing effects on those same skills. Motivated by a pre-registered pilot study suggesting a positive correlation between a skill's "teachability" by AI and its vulnerability to automation, we show that this information friction leads to a systematic skill mismatch. The planner over-invests in skills destined for obsolescence, a distortion that increases monotonically with AI prevalence. Extensions demonstrate that this mismatch is exacerbated by the neglect of unpriced non-cognitive skills and by the endogenous over-adoption of educational technology. Our findings caution that policies promoting AI in education, if not paired with forward-looking labor market signals, may paradoxically undermine students' long-term human capital, such as by crowding out skills like persistence that are forged through intellectual struggle.