Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly under scrutiny for perpetuating identity-based discrimination in high-stakes domains such as hiring, particularly against people with disabilities (PwD). However, existing research remains largely Western-centric, overlooking how intersecting forms of marginalization--such as gender and caste--shape experiences of PwD in the Global South. We conduct a comprehensive audit of six LLMs across 2,820 hiring scenarios spanning diverse disability, gender, nationality, and caste profiles. To capture subtle intersectional harms and biases, we introduce ABLEIST (Ableism, Inspiration, Superhumanization, and Tokenism), a set of five ableism-specific and three intersectional harm metrics grounded in disability studies literature. Our results reveal significant increases in ABLEIST harms towards disabled candidates--harms that many state-of-the-art models failed to detect. These harms were further amplified by sharp increases in intersectional harms (e.g., Tokenism) for gender and caste-marginalized disabled candidates, highlighting critical blind spots in current safety tools and the need for intersectional safety evaluations of frontier models in high-stakes domains like hiring.

With the recent emergence of revolutionary autonomous agentic systems, research community is witnessing a significant shift from traditional static, passive, and domain-specific AI agents toward more dynamic, proactive, and generalizable agentic AI. Motivated by the growing interest in agentic AI and its potential trajectory toward AGI, we present a comprehensive survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models (Agentic MLLMs). In this survey, we explore the emerging paradigm of agentic MLLMs, delineating their conceptual foundations and distinguishing characteristics from conventional MLLM-based agents. We establish a conceptual framework that organizes agentic MLLMs along three fundamental dimensions: (i) Agentic internal intelligence functions as the system's commander, enabling accurate long-horizon planning through reasoning, reflection, and memory; (ii) Agentic external tool invocation, whereby models proactively use various external tools to extend their problem-solving capabilities beyond their intrinsic knowledge; and (iii) Agentic environment interaction further situates models within virtual or physical environments, allowing them to take actions, adapt strategies, and sustain goal-directed behavior in dynamic real-world scenarios. To further accelerate research in this area for the community, we compile open-source training frameworks, training and evaluation datasets for developing agentic MLLMs. Finally, we review the downstream applications of agentic MLLMs and outline future research directions for this rapidly evolving field. To continuously track developments in this rapidly evolving field, we will also actively update a public repository at https://github.com/HJYao00/Awesome-Agentic-MLLMs.

Training student models on synthetic data generated by strong teacher models is a promising way to distilling the capabilities of teachers. However, recent studies show that stronger models are not always optimal teachers, revealing a mismatch between teacher outputs and student learnability. To address this issue, we propose PerSyn (Personalized data Synthesis), a novel synthesis strategy that operates under a new ``Route then Generate'' paradigm to create data tailored to each student model, enabling it to learn more effectively. Specifically, PerSyn first assigns each prompt to its optimal teacher via a query-level router that jointly considers student learnability and teacher response quality. Each teacher then synthesizes data only for its assigned prompts, making the process more efficient than the conventional ``Generate then Select'' paradigm, where all teachers must generate parallel responses for the entire prompt set before constructing the final dataset. Extensive experiments across different model families and scales demonstrate that PerSyn consistently achieves superior or comparable performance to all baselines in instruct tuning and math reasoning settings. Further analysis verifies the effectiveness of PerSyn and offers extra insights to propel future research.

Although student learning satisfaction has been widely studied, modern techniques such as interpretable machine learning and neural networks have not been sufficiently explored. This study demonstrates that a recent model that combines boosting with interpretability, automatic piecewise linear regression(APLR), offers the best fit for predicting learning satisfaction among several state-of-the-art approaches. Through the analysis of APLR's numerical and visual interpretations, students' time management and concentration abilities, perceived helpfulness to classmates, and participation in offline courses have the most significant positive impact on learning satisfaction. Surprisingly, involvement in creative activities did not positively affect learning satisfaction. Moreover, the contributing factors can be interpreted on an individual level, allowing educators to customize instructions according to student profiles.

A critical challenge in contemporary sports science lies in filling the gap between group-level insights derived from controlled hypothesis-driven experiments and the real-world need for personalized coaching tailored to individual athletes' unique movement patterns. This study developed a Personalized Motion Guidance Framework (PMGF) to enhance athletic performance by generating individualized motion-refinement guides using generative artificial intelligence techniques. PMGF leverages a vertical autoencoder to encode motion sequences into athlete-specific latent representations, which can then be directly manipulated to generate meaningful guidance motions. Two manipulation strategies were explored: (1) smooth interpolation between the learner's motion and a target (e.g., expert) motion to facilitate observational learning, and (2) shifting the motion pattern in an optimal direction in the latent space using a local optimization technique. The results of the validation experiment with data from 51 baseball pitchers revealed that (1) PMGF successfully generated smooth transitions in motion patterns between individuals across all 1,275 pitcher pairs, and (2) the features significantly altered through PMGF manipulations reflected known performance-enhancing characteristics, such as increased stride length and knee extension associated with higher ball velocity, indicating that PMGF induces biomechanically plausible improvements. We propose a future extension called general-PMGF to enhance the applicability of this framework. This extension incorporates bodily, environmental, and task constraints into the generation process, aiming to provide more realistic and versatile guidance across diverse sports contexts.

Understanding what drives popularity is critical in today's digital service economy, where content creators compete for consumer attention. Prior studies have primarily emphasized the role of content features, yet creators often misjudge what audiences actually value. This study applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling to a large corpus of TED Talks, treating the platform as a case of digital service provision in which creators (speakers) and consumers (audiences) interact. By comparing the thematic supply of creators with the demand expressed in audience engagement, we identify persistent mismatches between producer offerings and consumer preferences. Our longitudinal analysis further reveals that temporal dynamics exert a stronger influence on consumer engagement than thematic content, suggesting that when content is delivered may matter more than what is delivered. These findings challenge the dominant assumption that content features are the primary drivers of popularity and highlight the importance of timing and contextual factors in shaping consumer responses. The results provide new insights into consumer attention dynamics on digital platforms and carry practical implications for marketers, platform managers, and content creators seeking to optimize audience engagement strategies.

Simulators of animal movements play a valuable role in studying behavior. Advances in imitation learning for robotics have expanded possibilities for reproducing human and animal movements. A key challenge for realistic multi-animal simulation in biology is bridging the gap between unknown real-world transition models and their simulated counterparts. Because locomotion dynamics are seldom known, relying solely on mathematical models is insufficient; constructing a simulator that both reproduces real trajectories and supports reward-driven optimization remains an open problem. We introduce a data-driven simulator for multi-animal behavior based on deep reinforcement learning and counterfactual simulation. We address the ill-posed nature of the problem caused by high degrees of freedom in locomotion by estimating movement variables of an incomplete transition model as actions within an RL framework. We also employ a distance-based pseudo-reward to align and compare states between cyber and physical spaces. Validated on artificial agents, flies, newts, and silkmoth, our approach achieves higher reproducibility of species-specific behaviors and improved reward acquisition compared with standard imitation and RL methods. Moreover, it enables counterfactual behavior prediction in novel experimental settings and supports multi-individual modeling for flexible what-if trajectory generation, suggesting its potential to simulate and elucidate complex multi-animal behaviors.

Uncertainty quantification for LLMs is a key research direction towards addressing hallucination and other issues that limit their reliable deployment. In this work, we show that reasoning trace length is a simple and useful confidence estimator in large reasoning models. Through comprehensive experiments across multiple models, datasets, and prompts, we show that trace length performs in comparable but complementary ways to other zero-shot confidence estimators such as verbalized confidence. Our work reveals that reasoning post-training fundamentally alters the relationship between trace length and accuracy, going beyond prior work that had shown that post-training causes traces to grow longer in general (e.g., "overthinking"). We investigate the mechanisms behind trace length's performance as a confidence signal, observing that the effect remains even after adjusting for confounders such as problem difficulty and GRPO-induced length bias. We identify high-entropy or "forking" tokens as playing a key role in the mechanism. Our findings demonstrate that reasoning post-training enhances uncertainty quantification beyond verbal expressions, and establish trace length as a practical confidence measure for large reasoning models.

The ability of language models in RAG systems to selectively refuse to answer based on flawed context is critical for safety, yet remains a significant failure point. Our large-scale study reveals that even frontier models struggle in this setting, with refusal accuracy dropping below 50% on multi-document tasks, while exhibiting either dangerous overconfidence or overcaution. Static benchmarks fail to reliably evaluate this capability, as models exploit dataset-specific artifacts and memorize test instances. We introduce RefusalBench, a generative methodology that programmatically creates diagnostic test cases through controlled linguistic perturbation. Our framework employs 176 distinct perturbation strategies across six categories of informational uncertainty and three intensity levels. Evaluation of over 30 models uncovers systematic failure patterns: refusal comprises separable detection and categorization skills, and neither scale nor extended reasoning improves performance. We find that selective refusal is a trainable, alignment-sensitive capability, offering a clear path for improvement. We release two benchmarks -- RefusalBench-NQ (single document) and RefusalBench-GaRAGe (multi-document) -- and our complete generation framework to enable continued, dynamic evaluation of this critical capability.

Speech Translation (ST) is a machine translation task that involves converting speech signals from one language to the corresponding text in another language; this task has two different approaches, namely the traditional cascade and the more recent end-to-end. This paper explores a combined end-to-end architecture of pre-trained speech encoders and Large Language Models (LLMs) for performing both Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and ST simultaneously. Experiments with the English-to-German language pair show that our best model not only can achieve better translation results than SeamlessM4T, a large foundational end-to-end, multi-modal translation model, but can also match the performance of a cascaded system with Whisper and NLLB, with up to a score gain of 8% in $\text{COMET}^{\text{DA}}_{22}$ metric.