Large Language Models (LLMs) have been evaluated using diverse question types, e.g., multiple-choice, true/false, and short/long answers. This study answers an unexplored question about the impact of different question types on LLM accuracy on reasoning tasks. We investigate the performance of five LLMs on three different types of questions using quantitative and deductive reasoning tasks. The performance metrics include accuracy in the reasoning steps and choosing the final answer. Key Findings: (1) Significant differences exist in LLM performance across different question types. (2) Reasoning accuracy does not necessarily correlate with the final selection accuracy. (3) The number of options and the choice of words, influence LLM performance.

--This paper presents Forte, a fully 3D-printable, 6-DoF robotic arm designed to achieve near industrial-grade performance - 0 . As an accessible robot for broad applications across classroom education to AI experiments, Forte pushes forward the performance limitations of existing low-cost educational arms. We introduce a cost-effective mechanical design that combines capstan-based cable drives, timing belts, simple tensioning mechanisms, and lightweight 3D-printed structures, along with topology optimization for structural stiffness. Through careful drivetrain engineering, we minimize backlash and maintain control fidelity without relying on high-power electronics or expensive manufacturing processes. Experimental validation demonstrates that Forte achieves high repeatability and load capacity, offering a compelling robotic platform for both classroom instruction and advanced robotics research. Can we build a 6-degree-of-freedom (DoF) robotic arm with a material cost under $400, while achieving a half-meter workspace, a payload capacity of more than 0.5 kg, and repeatability within 0. 5 mm? We introduce Forte, a fully 3D-printed robotic manipulator, developed to affirmatively answer this question. In light of surging interest in robotics and artificial intelligence, providing accessible, hands-on educational tools has never been more important, as practical experience and experimental validation are essential components of robotics education.

Using multiple-choice questions (MCQs) has become a standard for assessing LLM capabilities efficiently. A variety of metrics can be employed for this task. However, previous research has not conducted a thorough assessment of them. At the same time, MCQ evaluation suffers from answer fluctuation: models produce different results given slight changes in prompts. We suggest a metric assessment protocol in which evaluation methodologies are analyzed through their connection with fluctuation rates, as well as original performance. Our results show that there is a strong link between existing metrics and the answer changing, even when computed without any additional prompt variants. A novel metric, worst accuracy, demonstrates the highest association on the protocol.

Recent progress in LLMs, such as reasoning models, has demonstrated strong abilities to solve complex competitive programming problems, often rivaling top human competitors. However, it remains underexplored whether these abilities generalize to relevant domains that are less seen during training. To address this, we introduce AlgoSimBench, a new benchmark designed to assess LLMs' ability to identify algorithmically similar problems (ASPs)-problems that can be solved using similar algorithmic approaches. AlgoSimBench consists of 1317 problems, annotated with 231 distinct fine-grained algorithm tags, from which we curate 402 multiple-choice questions (MCQs), where each question presents one algorithmically similar problem alongside three textually similar but algorithmically dissimilar distractors. Our evaluation reveals that LLMs struggle to identify ASPs, with the best-performing model (o3-mini) achieving only 65.9% accuracy on the MCQ task. To address this challenge, we propose attempted solution matching (ASM), a novel method for improving problem similarity detection. On our MCQ task, ASM yields an absolute accuracy improvement of 6.7% to 11.7% across different models. We also evaluated code embedding models and retrieval methods on similar problem identification. While the adversarial selection of problems degrades the performance to be less than random, we found that simply summarizing the problem to remove narrative elements eliminates the effect, and combining ASM with a keyword-prioritized method, BM25, can yield up to 52.2% accuracy. Code and data are available at github.com

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally determined by the contextual information provided during inference. This survey introduces Context Engineering, a formal discipline that transcends simple prompt design to encompass the systematic optimization of information payloads for LLMs. We present a comprehensive taxonomy decomposing Context Engineering into its foundational components and the sophisticated implementations that integrate them into intelligent systems. We first examine the foundational components: context retrieval and generation, context processing and context management. We then explore how these components are architecturally integrated to create sophisticated system implementations: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory systems and tool-integrated reasoning, and multi-agent systems. Through this systematic analysis of over 1400 research papers, our survey not only establishes a technical roadmap for the field but also reveals a critical research gap: a fundamental asymmetry exists between model capabilities. While current models, augmented by advanced context engineering, demonstrate remarkable proficiency in understanding complex contexts, they exhibit pronounced limitations in generating equally sophisticated, long-form outputs. Addressing this gap is a defining priority for future research. Ultimately, this survey provides a unified framework for both researchers and engineers advancing context-aware AI.

We present Kwaipilot-AutoThink (KAT), an open-source 40B large language model developed to address the overthinking problem in reasoning-intensive tasks, where an automatic thinking training paradigm is proposed to dynamically switch between reasoning and non-reasoning modes based on task complexity. Specifically, first, we construct the dual-regime dataset based on a novel tagging pipeline and a multi-agent synthesis strategy, and then we apply Multi-Token Prediction (MTP)-enhanced knowledge distillation, enabling efficient and fine-grained reasoning transfer with minimal pretraining cost. Besides, we implement a cold-start initialization strategy that introduces mode-selection priors using majority-vote signals and intent-aware prompting. Finally, we propose Step-SRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that incorporates intermediate supervision into the GRPO framework, offering structured guidance over both reasoning-mode selection and response accuracy. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that KAT consistently matches or even outperforms current state-of-the-art models, including DeepSeek-R1-0528 and Qwen3-235B-A22B, across a wide range of reasoning-intensive tasks while reducing token usage. Notably, KAT outperforms all open-source models and even surpasses o3-mini on the leakage-controlled LiveCodeBench Pro. Beyond academic evaluation, KAT has been successfully deployed in Kwaipilot (i.e., Kuaishou's internal coding assistant), where it improves real-world development workflows with high accuracy, efficiency, and controllable reasoning behaviors. Moreover, we are actively training a 200B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 40B active parameters, and early results already show significant gains, further demonstrating the scalability of the AutoThink paradigm.

Realistic, high-fidelity 3D facial animations are crucial for expressive avatar systems in human-computer interaction and accessibility. Although prior methods show promising quality, their reliance on the mesh domain limits their ability to fully leverage the rapid visual innovations seen in 2D computer vision and graphics. We propose VisualSpeaker, a novel method that bridges this gap using photorealistic differentiable rendering, supervised by visual speech recognition, for improved 3D facial animation. Our contribution is a perceptual lip-reading loss, derived by passing photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting avatar renders through a pre-trained Visual Automatic Speech Recognition model during training. Evaluation on the MEAD dataset demonstrates that VisualSpeaker improves both the standard Lip Vertex Error metric by 56.1% and the perceptual quality of the generated animations, while retaining the controllability of mesh-driven animation. This perceptual focus naturally supports accurate mouthings, essential cues that disambiguate similar manual signs in sign language avatars.

Digital textbooks are widely used in various educational contexts, such as university courses and online lectures. Such textbooks yield learning log data that have been used in numerous educational data mining (EDM) studies for student behavior analysis and performance prediction. However, these studies have faced challenges in integrating confidential data, such as academic records and learning logs, across schools due to privacy concerns. Consequently, analyses are often conducted with data limited to a single school, which makes developing high-performing and generalizable models difficult. This study proposes a method that combines federated learning and differential features to address these issues. Federated learning enables model training without centralizing data, thereby preserving student privacy. Differential features, which utilize relative values instead of absolute values, enhance model performance and generalizability. To evaluate the proposed method, a model for predicting at-risk students was trained using data from 1,136 students across 12 courses conducted over 4 years, and validated on hold-out test data from 5 other courses. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method addresses privacy concerns while achieving performance comparable to that of models trained via centralized learning in terms of Top-n precision, nDCG, and PR-AUC. Furthermore, using differential features improved prediction performance across all evaluation datasets compared to non-differential approaches. The trained models were also applicable for early prediction, achieving high performance in detecting at-risk students in earlier stages of the semester within the validation datasets.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy, yet it faces significant challenges in communication efficiency and vulnerability to poisoning attacks. While sparsification techniques mitigate communication overhead by transmitting only critical model parameters, they inadvertently amplify security risks: adversarial clients can exploit sparse updates to evade detection and degrade model performance. Existing defense mechanisms, designed for standard FL communication scenarios, are ineffective in addressing these vulnerabilities within sparsified FL. To bridge this gap, we propose FLARE, a novel federated learning framework that integrates sparse index mask inspection and model update sign similarity analysis to detect and mitigate poisoning attacks in sparsified FL. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and adversarial scenarios demonstrate that FLARE significantly outperforms existing defense strategies, effectively securing sparsified FL against poisoning attacks while maintaining communication efficiency.

Scientists often infer abstract procedures from specific instances of problems and use the abstractions to generate new, related instances. For example, programs encoding the formal rules and properties of a system have been useful in fields ranging from reinforcement learning (procedural environments) to physics (simulation engines). These programs can be seen as functions which execute to different outputs based on their parameterizations (e.g., gridworld configuration or initial physical conditions). We introduce the term EFA (Executable Functional Abstraction) to denote such programs for math problems. EFA-like constructs have been shown to be useful for mathematical reasoning as problem generators for stress-testing models. However, prior work has been limited to automatically constructing abstractions for grade-school math (whose simple rules are easy to encode in programs), while generating EFAs for advanced math has thus far required human engineering. We explore the automatic construction of EFAs for advanced mathematics problems by developing EFAGen, which operationalizes the task of automatically inferring an EFA for a given seed problem and solution as a program synthesis task. We first formalize the properties of any valid EFA as executable unit tests. Using execution feedback from the unit tests, we search over candidate programs sampled from a LLM to find EFA programs that are faithful to the generalized problem and solution class underlying the seed problem. We then apply the tests as a reward signal, training LLMs to become better writers of EFAs. We show that EFAs inferred by EFAGen are faithful to the seed problems, produce learnable problem variations, and that EFAGen can infer EFAs across diverse sources of competition-level math problems. Finally, we show uses of model-written EFAs e.g., finding harder/easier problem variants, as well as data generation.