The Free Energy Principle (FEP) states that self-organizing systems must minimize variational free energy to persist (Friston, 2010, 2019), but the path from principle to implementable algorithm has remained unclear. We present a constructive proof that the FEP can be realized through exact local credit assignment. The system decomposes gradient computation hierarchically: spatial credit via feedback alignment, temporal credit via eligibility traces, and structural credit via a Trophic Field Map (TFM) that estimates expected gradient magnitude for each connection block. We prove these mechanisms are exact at their respective levels and validate the central claim empirically: the TFM achieves 0.9693 Pearson correlation with oracle gradients. This exactness produces emergent capabilities including 98.6% retention after task interference, autonomous recovery from 75% structural damage, self-organized criticality (spectral radius ρ 1.0), and sample-efficient reinforcement learning on continuous control tasks without replay buffers. The architecture unifies Pri-gogine's dissipative structures (Prigogine, 1977), Fris-ton's free energy minimization (Friston, 2010), and Hopfield's attractor dynamics (Hopfield, 1982; Amit et al., 1985a,b), demonstrating that exact hierarchical inference over network topology can be implemented with local, biologically plausible rules.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in education, yet their correctness alone does not capture the quality, reliability, or pedagogical validity of their problem-solving behavior, especially in mathematics, where multistep logic, symbolic reasoning, and conceptual clarity are critical. Conventional evaluation methods largely focus on final answer accuracy and overlook the reasoning process. To address this gap, we introduce a novel interpretability framework for analyzing LLM-generated solutions using undergraduate calculus problems as a representative domain. Our approach combines reasoning flow extraction and decomposing solutions into semantically labeled operations and concepts with prompt ablation analysis to assess input salience and output stability. Using structured metrics such as reasoning complexity, phrase sensitivity, and robustness, we evaluated the model behavior on real Calculus I to III university exams. Our findings revealed that LLMs often produce syntactically fluent yet conceptually flawed solutions, with reasoning patterns sensitive to prompt phrasing and input variation. This framework enables fine-grained diagnosis of reasoning failures, supports curriculum alignment, and informs the design of interpretable AI-assisted feedback tools. This is the first study to offer a structured, quantitative, and pedagogically grounded framework for interpreting LLM reasoning in mathematics education, laying the foundation for the transparent and responsible deployment of AI in STEM learning environments.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong benchmark performance, yet user experiences remain inconsistent due to diverse preferences in style, tone, and reasoning mode. Nevertheless, existing alignment techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) largely optimize toward population-level averages and overlook individual variation. Naive personalization strategies like per-user fine-tuning are computationally prohibitive, and in-context approaches that prepend raw user signals often suffer from inefficiency and noise. To address these challenges, we propose POPI, a general framework that introduces a preference inference model to distill heterogeneous user signals into concise natural language summaries. These summaries act as transparent, compact, and transferable personalization representations that condition a shared generation model to produce personalized responses. POPI jointly optimizes both preference inference and personalized generation under a unified objective using reinforcement learning, ensuring summaries maximally encode useful preference information. Extensive experiments across four personalization benchmarks demonstrate that POPI consistently improves personalization accuracy while reducing context overhead by a large margin. Moreover, optimized summaries seamlessly transfer to frozen off-the-shelf LLMs, enabling plug-and-play personalization without weight updates.

Building robots that can perceive, reason, and act in dynamic, unstructured environments remains a core challenge. Recent embodied systems often adopt a dual-system paradigm, where System 2 handles high-level reasoning while System 1 executes low-level control. In this work, we refer to System 2 as the embodied brain, emphasizing its role as the cognitive core for reasoning and decision-making in manipulation tasks. Given this role, systematic evaluation of the embodied brain is essential. Yet existing benchmarks emphasize execution success, or when targeting high-level reasoning, suffer from incomplete dimensions and limited task realism, offering only a partial picture of cognitive capability. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboBench, a benchmark that systematically evaluates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as embodied brains. Motivated by the critical roles across the full manipulation pipeline, RoboBench defines five dimensions-instruction comprehension, perception reasoning, generalized planning, affordance prediction, and failure analysis-spanning 14 capabilities, 25 tasks, and 6092 QA pairs. To ensure realism, we curate datasets across diverse embodiments, attribute-rich objects, and multi-view scenes, drawing from large-scale real robotic data. For planning, RoboBench introduces an evaluation framework, MLLM-as-world-simulator. It evaluate embodied feasibility by simulating whether predicted plans can achieve critical object-state changes. Experiments on 14 MLLMs reveal fundamental limitations: difficulties with implicit instruction comprehension, spatiotemporal reasoning, cross-scenario planning, fine-grained affordance understanding, and execution failure diagnosis. RoboBench provides a comprehensive scaffold to quantify high-level cognition, and guide the development of next-generation embodied MLLMs. The project page is in https://robo-bench.github.io.

As stories of human-AI interactions continue to be highlighted in the news and research platforms, the challenges are becoming more pronounced, including potential risks of overreliance, cognitive offloading, social and emotional manipulation, and the nuanced degradation of human agency and judgment. This paper surveys recent research on these issues through the lens of the psychological triad: cognition, behavior, and emotion. Observations seem to suggest that while AI can substantially enhance memory, creativity, and engagement, it also introduces risks such as diminished critical thinking, skill erosion, and increased anxiety. Emotional outcomes are similarly mixed, with AI systems showing promise for support and stress reduction, but raising concerns about dependency, inappropriate attachments, and ethical oversight. This paper aims to underscore the need for responsible and context-aware AI design, highlighting gaps for longitudinal research and grounded evaluation frameworks to balance benefits with emerging human-centric risks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly transitioned from academic research to core components of real-world applications, especially since the emergence of high-profile foundation models such as OpenAI's GPT series [17, 140], Google Gemini [9], Meta Llama [175, 176], Anthropic Claude [12], Alibaba Qwen [11, 210, 209], and Doubao [172]. Today, LLMs are deployed across an unprecedented range of sectors--from web search and code assistants to legal, educational, and healthcare domains--reaching hundreds of millions of end users globally. The rapid adoption of LLMs has ushered in a new era of AI-powered services, but it also brings serious safety and security risks. These risks manifest in multiple forms, ranging from misinformation and privacy leaks to adversarial attacks that exploit model vulnerabilities. In particular, a growing body of work shows that carefully crafted jailbreak prompts can bypass alignment constraints, inducing models to produce sensitive, illegal, or harmful content. Alarmingly, recent studies report that such attacks achieve success rates exceeding 90% even on flagship models such as GPT-4, Claude 3, and DeepSeek-R1 [124, 42, 154, 118]. The outputs generated through these attacks could be used for malicious purposes, underscoring the urgent need for close attention and mitigation.

We study whether self-learning can scale LLM-based agents without relying on human-curated datasets or predefined rule-based rewards. Through controlled experiments in a search-agent setting, we identify two key determinants of scalable agent training: the source of reward signals and the scale of agent task data. We find that rewards from a Generative Reward Model (GRM) outperform rigid rule-based signals for open-domain learning, and that co-evolving the GRM with the policy further boosts performance. Increasing the volume of agent task data-even when synthetically generated-substantially enhances agentic capabilities. Building on these insights, we propose \textbf{Agentic Self-Learning} (ASL), a fully closed-loop, multi-role reinforcement learning framework that unifies task generation, policy execution, and evaluation within a shared tool environment and LLM backbone. ASL coordinates a Prompt Generator, a Policy Model, and a Generative Reward Model to form a virtuous cycle of harder task setting, sharper verification, and stronger solving. Empirically, ASL delivers steady, round-over-round gains, surpasses strong RLVR baselines (e.g., Search-R1) that plateau or degrade, and continues improving under zero-labeled-data conditions, indicating superior sample efficiency and robustness. We further show that GRM verification capacity is the main bottleneck: if frozen, it induces reward hacking and stalls progress; continual GRM training on the evolving data distribution mitigates this, and a small late-stage injection of real verification data raises the performance ceiling. This work establishes reward source and data scale as critical levers for open-domain agent learning and demonstrates the efficacy of multi-role co-evolution for scalable, self-improving agents. The data and code of this paper are released at https://github.com/forangel2014/Towards-Agentic-Self-Learning

What if artificial agents could not just communicate, but also evolve, adapt, and reshape their worlds in ways we cannot fully predict? With llm now powering multi-agent systems and social simulations, we are witnessing new possibilities for modeling open-ended, ever-changing environments. Yet, most current simulations remain constrained within static sandboxes, characterized by predefined tasks, limited dynamics, and rigid evaluation criteria. These limitations prevent them from capturing the complexity of real-world societies. In this paper, we argue that static, task-specific benchmarks are fundamentally inadequate and must be rethought. We critically review emerging architectures that blend llm with multi-agent dynamics, highlight key hurdles such as balancing stability and diversity, evaluating unexpected behaviors, and scaling to greater complexity, and introduce a fresh taxonomy for this rapidly evolving field. Finally, we present a research roadmap centered on open-endedness, continuous co-evolution, and the development of resilient, socially aligned AI ecosystems. We call on the community to move beyond static paradigms and help shape the next generation of adaptive, socially-aware multi-agent simulations.

We present a system that uses LLMs as a tool in the development of Constructed Languages. The system is modular in that one first creates a target phonology for the language using an agentic approach that refines its output at each step with commentary feedback on its previous attempt. Next, a set of sentences is 'translated' from their English original into a morphosyntactic markup that reflects the word order and morphosyntactic feature specifications of the desired target language, with affixes represented as morphosyntactic feature bundles. From this translated corpus, a lexicon is constructed using the phonological model and the set of morphemes (stems and affixes) extracted from the 'translated' sentences. The system is then instructed to provide an orthography for the language, using an existing script such as Latin or Cyrillic. Finally, the system writes a brief grammatical handbook of the language. The system can also translate further sentences into the target language. Our goal is twofold. First, we hope that these tools will be fun to use for creating artificially constructed languages. Second, we are interested in exploring what LLMs 'know' about language-not what they know about any particular language or linguistic phenomenon, but how much they know about and understand language and linguistic concepts. As we shall see, there is a fairly wide gulf in capabilities both among different LLMs and among different linguistic specifications, with it being notably easier for systems to deal with more common patterns than rarer ones. An additional avenue that we explore is the application of our approach to translating from high-resource into low-resource languages. While the results so far are mostly negative, we provide some evidence that an improved version of the present system could afford some real gains in such tasks. https://github.com/SakanaAI/IASC

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the \textit{reasoning} or \textit{thinking} capabilities of LLMs to solve complex problems. Despite the promising results of reasoning LLMs, enhancing the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs still remains a significant challenge. While existing optimization methods have advanced the LLM reasoning capabilities, they often treat reasoning trajectories as a whole, without considering the underlying critical steps within the trajectory. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{G}uided \textbf{P}ivotal \textbf{O}ptimization (GPO), a novel fine-tuning strategy that dives into the reasoning process to enable more effective improvements. GPO first identifies the `critical step' within a reasoning trajectory - a point that the model must carefully proceed to succeed at the problem. We locate the critical step by estimating the advantage function. GPO then resets the policy to the critical step, samples the new rollout and prioritizes the learning process on those rollouts. This focus allows the model to learn more effectively from pivotal moments within the reasoning process to improve the reasoning performance. We demonstrate that GPO is a general strategy that can be integrated with various optimization methods to improve reasoning performance. Besides theoretical analysis, our experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks show that GPO can consistently and significantly enhance the performance of existing optimization methods, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in improving LLM reasoning by concentrating on pivotal moments within the generation process.