Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as science, law, and healthcare, where accurate expressions of uncertainty are essential for reliability and trust. However, current LLMs are often observed to generate incorrect answers with high confidence, a phenomenon known as "overconfidence". Recent efforts have focused on calibrating LLMs' verbalized confidence: i.e., their expressions of confidence in text form, such as "I am 80% confident that...". Existing approaches either rely on prompt engineering or fine-tuning with heuristically generated uncertainty estimates, both of which have limited effectiveness and generalizability. Motivated by the notion of proper scoring rules for calibration in classical machine learning models, we introduce ConfTuner, a simple and efficient fine-tuning method that introduces minimal overhead and does not require ground-truth confidence scores or proxy confidence estimates. ConfTuner relies on a new loss function, tokenized Brier score, which we theoretically prove to be a proper scoring rule, intuitively meaning that it "correctly incentivizes the model to report its true probability of being correct". ConfTuner improves calibration across diverse reasoning tasks and generalizes to black-box models such as GPT-4o. Our results further show that better-calibrated confidence enables downstream gains in self-correction and model cascade, advancing the development of trustworthy LLM systems. The code is available at https://github.com/liushiliushi/ConfTuner.

Advances in 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis have enabled efficient and photorealistic rendering. However, images for reconstruction are still either largely manual or constrained by simple preplanned trajectories. To address this issue, recent works propose generalizable next-best-view planners that do not require online learning. Nevertheless, robustness and performance remain limited across various shapes. Hence, this study introduces Voxel-Face-Aware Hierarchical Next-Best-View Acquisition for Efficient 3D Reconstruction (Hestia), which addresses the shortcomings of the reinforcement learning-based generalizable approaches for five-degree-of-freedom viewpoint prediction. Hestia systematically improves the planners through four components: a more diverse dataset to promote robustness, a hierarchical structure to manage the high-dimensional continuous action search space, a close-greedy strategy to mitigate spurious correlations, and a face-aware design to avoid overlooking geometry. Experimental results show that Hestia achieves non-marginal improvements, with at least a 4% gain in coverage ratio, while reducing Chamfer Distance by 50% and maintaining real-time inference. In addition, Hestia outperforms prior methods by at least 12% in coverage ratio with a 5-image budget and remains robust to object placement variations. Finally, we demonstrate that Hestia, as a next-best-view planner, is feasible for the real-world application. Our project page is https://johnnylu305.github.io/hestia web.

Post-training of large language models is essential for adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) to align with human preferences and downstream tasks. While PLMs typically exhibit well-calibrated confidence, post-trained language models (PoLMs) often suffer from over-confidence, assigning high confidence to both correct and incorrect outputs, which can undermine reliability in critical applications. A major obstacle in calibrating PoLMs is the scarcity of labeled data for individual downstream tasks. To address this, we propose Disagreement-Aware Confidence Alignment (DACA), a novel unsupervised method to optimize the parameters (e.g., temperature $τ$) in post-hoc confidence calibration. Our method is motivated by the under-confidence issue caused by prediction disagreement between the PLM and PoLM while aligning their confidence via temperature scaling. Theoretically, the PLM's confidence underestimates PoLM's prediction accuracy on disagreement examples, causing a larger $τ$ and producing under-confident predictions. DACA mitigates this by selectively using only agreement examples for calibration, effectively decoupling the influence of disagreement. In this manner, our method avoids an overly large $τ$ in temperature scaling caused by disagreement examples, improving calibration performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, improving the average ECE of open-sourced and API-based LLMs (e.g. GPT-4o) by up to 15.08$\%$ on common benchmarks.

Reasoning is central to human intelligence, enabling structured problem-solving across diverse tasks. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced their reasoning abilities in arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic domains. However, effectively extending these capabilities into multimodal contexts-where models must integrate both visual and textual inputs-continues to be a significant challenge. Multimodal reasoning introduces complexities, such as handling conflicting information across modalities, which require models to adopt advanced interpretative strategies. Addressing these challenges involves not only sophisticated algorithms but also robust methodologies for evaluating reasoning accuracy and coherence. This paper offers a concise yet insightful overview of reasoning techniques in both textual and multimodal LLMs. Through a thorough and up-to-date comparison, we clearly formulate core reasoning challenges and opportunities, highlighting practical methods for post-training optimization and test-time inference. Our work provides valuable insights and guidance, bridging theoretical frameworks and practical implementations, and sets clear directions for future research.

Automated scoring of written constructed responses typically relies on separate models per task, straining computational resources, storage, and maintenance in real-world education settings. We propose UniMoE-Guided, a knowledge-distilled multi-task Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach that transfers expertise from multiple task-specific large models (teachers) into a single compact, deployable model (student). The student combines (i) a shared encoder for cross-task representations, (ii) a gated MoE block that balances shared and task-specific processing, and (iii) lightweight task heads. Trained with both ground-truth labels and teacher guidance, the student matches strong task-specific models while being far more efficient to train, store, and deploy. Beyond efficiency, the MoE layer improves transfer and generalization: experts develop reusable skills that boost cross-task performance and enable rapid adaptation to new tasks with minimal additions and tuning. On nine NGSS-aligned science-reasoning tasks (seven for training/evaluation and two held out for adaptation), UniMoE-Guided attains performance comparable to per-task models while using $\sim$6$\times$ less storage than maintaining separate students, and $87\times$ less than the 20B-parameter teacher. The method offers a practical path toward scalable, reliable, and resource-efficient automated scoring for classroom and large-scale assessment systems.

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) is crucial for deploying models in real-world applications with unseen, evolving target domains. Existing CTTA methods, however, often rely on source data or prototypes, limiting their applicability in privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained settings. Additionally, these methods suffer from long-term forgetting, which degrades performance on previously encountered domains as target domains shift. To address these challenges, we propose SloMo-Fast, a source-free, dual-teacher CTTA framework designed for enhanced adaptability and generalization. It includes two complementary teachers: the Slow-Teacher, which exhibits slow forgetting and retains long-term knowledge of previously encountered domains to ensure robust generalization, and the Fast-Teacher rapidly adapts to new domains while accumulating and integrating knowledge across them. This framework preserves knowledge of past domains and adapts efficiently to new ones. We also introduce Cyclic Test-Time Adaptation (Cyclic-TTA), a novel CTTA benchmark that simulates recurring domain shifts. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SloMo-Fast consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across Cyclic-TTA, as well as ten other CTTA settings, highlighting its ability to both adapt and generalize across evolving and revisited domains.

State-of-the-art flow models achieve remarkable quality but require slow, iterative sampling. To accelerate this, flow maps can be distilled from pre-trained teachers, a procedure that conventionally requires sampling from an external dataset. We argue that this data-dependency introduces a fundamental risk of Teacher-Data Mismatch, as a static dataset may provide an incomplete or even misaligned representation of the teacher's full generative capabilities. This leads us to question whether this reliance on data is truly necessary for successful flow map distillation. In this work, we explore a data-free alternative that samples only from the prior distribution, a distribution the teacher is guaranteed to follow by construction, thereby circumventing the mismatch risk entirely. To demonstrate the practical viability of this philosophy, we introduce a principled framework that learns to predict the teacher's sampling path while actively correcting for its own compounding errors to ensure high fidelity. Our approach surpasses all data-based counterparts and establishes a new state-of-the-art by a significant margin. Specifically, distilling from SiT-XL/2+REPA, our method reaches an impressive FID of 1.45 on ImageNet 256x256, and 1.49 on ImageNet 512x512, both with only 1 sampling step. We hope our work establishes a more robust paradigm for accelerating generative models and motivates the broader adoption of flow map distillation without data.

Despite significant progress in continual learning ranging from architectural novelty to clever strategies for mitigating catastrophic forgetting; most existing methods rest on a strong but unrealistic assumption: "the availability of labeled data throughout the learning process". In real-world scenarios, however, data often arrives sequentially and without annotations, rendering conventional approaches impractical. In this work, we revisit the fundamental assumptions of continual learning and ask: Can current systems adapt when labels are absent and tasks emerge incrementally over time? T o this end, we introduce Annotation-Free Class-Incremental Learning (AF-CIL), a more realistic and challenging paradigm where unlabeled data arrives continuously, and the learner must incrementally acquire new classes without any supervision. T o enable effective learning under AF-CIL, we propose CrossW orld-CL, a Cross Domain W orld Guided Continual Learning framework that incorporates external world knowledge as a stable auxiliary source. The method retrieves semantically related ImageNet classes for each downstream category, maps downstream and ImageNet features through a cross-domain alignment strategy and finally introduce a novel replay strategy. This design lets the model uncover semantic structure without annotations while keeping earlier knowledge intact.

Information-seeking is a core capability for AI agents, requiring them to gather and reason over tool-generated information across long trajectories. However, such multi-step information-seeking tasks remain challenging for agents backed by language models. While process reward models (PRMs) can guide agents by ranking candidate steps at test-time, existing PRMs, designed for short reasoning with binary judgment, cannot capture richer dimensions of information-seeking steps, such as tool interactions and reasoning over tool outputs, nor handle the rapidly growing context in long-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce PRInTS, a generative PRM trained with dual capabilities: (1) dense scoring based on the PRM's reasoning across multiple step quality dimensions (e.g., interpretation of tool outputs, tool call informativeness) and (2) trajectory summarization that compresses the growing context while preserving essential information for step evaluation. Extensive evaluations across FRAMES, GAIA (levels 1-3), and WebWalkerQA (easy-hard) benchmarks on multiple models, along with ablations, reveal that best-of-n sampling with PRInTS enhances information-seeking abilities of open-source models as well as specialized agents, matching or surpassing the performance of frontier models with a much smaller backbone agent and outperforming other strong reward modeling baselines.

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising parallel generation paradigm but suffer from slow inference due to numerous refinement steps and the inability to use standard KV caching. We introduce CDLM (Consistency Diffusion Language Models), a training-based acceleration method that simultaneously tackles both bottlenecks. CDLM integrates consistency modeling to drastically reduce the number of required sampling steps by enabling multi-token finalization. Furthermore, we enforce a block-wise causal attention mask during fine-tuning, making the model fully compatible with KV caching. Experiments show CDLM achieves 3.6x-14.5x lower latency while maintaining competitive accuracy on math and coding tasks. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/CDLM.