Industry
Demystifying deep search: a holistic evaluation with hint-free multi-hop questions and factorised metrics
Song, Maojia, Liu, Renhang, Wang, Xinyu, Jiang, Yong, Xie, Pengjun, Huang, Fei, Zhou, Jingren, Herremans, Dorien, Poria, Soujanya
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and web agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-hop deep search tasks, yet current practice suffers from two major limitations. First, most benchmarks leak the reasoning path in the question text, allowing models to follow surface cues rather than discover reasoning chains autonomously. Second, evaluation is typically reduced to a single pass rate, which collapses diverse behaviours into one score and obscures whether failures stem from inadequate search, poor knowledge use, or inappropriate refusal. To address these issues, we present WebDetective, a benchmark of hint-free multi-hop questions paired with a controlled Wikipedia sandbox that ensures full traceability of model actions, and a holistic evaluation framework that separates search sufficiency, knowledge utilisation, and refusal behaviour. Our evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art models reveals systematic weaknesses across all architectures: models struggle with knowledge utilisation despite having sufficient evidence and demonstrate near-absent appropriate refusal when evidence is lacking. These patterns expose a fundamental gap: today's systems excel at executing given reasoning paths but fail when required to discover them. We develop an agentic workflow, EvidenceLoop, that explicitly targets the challenges our benchmark identifies, incorporating verification loops and systematic evidence tracking that improve both search and synthesis capabilities. This baseline demonstrates that WebDetective's diagnostic framework can guide concrete architectural improvements, establishing our benchmark as a critical tool for developing genuinely autonomous reasoning systems rather than pattern-following agents.
Automatic Fact-checking in English and Telugu
Chikkala, Ravi Kiran, Anikina, Tatiana, Skachkova, Natalia, Vykopal, Ivan, Agerri, Rodrigo, van Genabith, Josef
False information poses a significant global challenge, and manually verifying claims is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. In this research paper, we experiment with different approaches to investigate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in classifying factual claims by their veracity and generating justifications in English and Telugu. The key contributions of this work include the creation of a bilingual English-Telugu dataset and the benchmarking of different veracity classification approaches based on LLMs.
Agentar-Scale-SQL: Advancing Text-to-SQL through Orchestrated Test-Time Scaling
Wang, Pengfei, Sun, Baolin, Dong, Xuemei, Dai, Yaxun, Yuan, Hongwei, Chu, Mengdie, Gao, Yingqi, Qi, Xiang, Zhang, Peng, Yan, Ying
State-of-the-art (SOTA) Text-to-SQL methods still lag significantly behind human experts on challenging benchmarks like BIRD. Current approaches that explore test-time scaling lack an orchestrated strategy and neglect the model's internal reasoning process. To bridge this gap, we introduce Agentar-Scale-SQL, a novel framework leveraging scalable computation to improve performance. Agentar-Scale-SQL implements an Orchestrated Test-Time Scaling strategy that synergistically combines three distinct perspectives: i) Internal Scaling via RL-enhanced Intrinsic Reasoning, ii) Sequential Scaling through Iterative Refinement, and iii) Parallel Scaling using Diverse Synthesis and Tournament Selection. Agentar-Scale-SQL is a general-purpose framework designed for easy adaptation to new databases and more powerful language models. Extensive experiments show that Agentar-Scale-SQL achieves SOTA performance on the BIRD benchmark, reaching 81.67% execution accuracy on the test set and ranking first on the official leaderboard, demonstrating an effective path toward human-level performance.
The Impossibility of Inverse Permutation Learning in Transformer Models
Alur, Rohan, Hays, Chris, Raghavan, Manish, Shah, Devavrat
In this technical note, we study the problem of inverse permutation learning in decoder-only transformers. Given a permutation and a string to which that permutation has been applied, the model is tasked with producing the original (``canonical'') string. We argue that this task models a natural robustness property across a variety of reasoning tasks, including long-context retrieval, multiple choice QA and in-context learning. Our primary contribution is an impossibility result: we show that an arbitrary depth, decoder-only transformer cannot learn this task. This result concerns the expressive capacity of decoder-only transformer models and is agnostic to training dynamics or sample complexity. We give a pair of alternative constructions under which inverse permutation learning is feasible. The first of these highlights the fundamental role of the causal attention mask, and reveals a gap between the expressivity of encoder-decoder transformers and the more popular decoder-only architecture. The latter result is more surprising: we show that simply padding the input with ``scratch tokens" yields a construction under which inverse permutation learning is possible. We conjecture that this may suggest an alternative mechanism by which chain-of-thought prompting or, more generally, intermediate ``thinking'' tokens can enable reasoning in large language models, even when these tokens encode no meaningful semantic information (e.g., the results of intermediate computations).
BridgeDrive: Diffusion Bridge Policy for Closed-Loop Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving
Liu, Shu, Chen, Wenlin, Li, Weihao, Wang, Zheng, Yang, Lijin, Huang, Jianing, Zhang, Yipin, Huang, Zhongzhan, Cheng, Ze, Yang, Hao
Diffusion-based planners have shown great promise for autonomous driving due to their ability to capture multi-modal driving behaviors. However, guiding these models effectively in reactive, closed-loop environments remains a significant challenge. Simple conditioning often fails to provide sufficient guidance in complex and dynamic driving scenarios. Recent work attempts to use typical expert driving behaviors (i.e., anchors) to guide diffusion models but relies on a truncated schedule, which introduces theoretical inconsistencies and can compromise performance. To address this, we introduce BridgeDrive, a novel anchor-guided diffusion bridge policy for closed-loop trajectory planning. Our approach provides a principled diffusion framework that effectively translates anchors into fine-grained trajectory plans, appropriately responding to varying traffic conditions. Our planner is compatible with efficient ODE solvers, a critical factor for real-time autonomous driving deployment. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Bench2Drive benchmark, improving the success rate by 7.72% over prior arts. Closed-loop planning with reactive agents is a critical challenge in autonomous driving, which requires effective interaction with complex and dynamic traffic environments (Jia et al., 2024).
A Unified Noise-Curvature View of Loss of Trainability
Baveja, Gunbir Singh, Lewandowski, Alex, Schmidt, Mark
Loss of trainability refers to a phenomenon in continual learning where parameter updates no longer make progress on the optimization objective, so accuracy stalls or degrades as the learning problem changes over time. In this paper, we analyze loss of trainability through an optimization lens and find that the phenomenon is not reliably predicted by existing individual indicators such as Hessian rank, sharpness level, weight or gradient norms, gradient-to-parameter ratios, and unit-sign entropy. Motivated by our analysis, we introduce two complementary indicators: a batch-size-aware gradient-noise bound and a curvature volatility-controlled bound. We then combine these two indicators into a per-layer adaptive noise threshold on the effective step-size that anticipates trainability behavior. Using this insight, we propose a step-size scheduler that keeps each layer's effective parameter update below this bound, thereby avoiding loss of trainability. We demonstrate that our scheduler can improve the accuracy maintained by previously proposed approaches, such as concatenated ReLU (CReLU), Wasserstein regularizer, and L2 weight decay. Surprisingly, our scheduler produces adaptive step-size trajectories that, without tuning, mirror the manually engineered step-size decay schedules.
SimpleFold: Folding Proteins is Simpler than You Think
Wang, Yuyang, Lu, Jiarui, Jaitly, Navdeep, Susskind, Josh, Bautista, Miguel Angel
Protein folding models have achieved groundbreaking results typically via a combination of integrating domain knowledge into the architectural blocks and training pipelines. Nonetheless, given the success of generative models across different but related problems, it is natural to question whether these architectural designs are a necessary condition to build performant models. In this paper, we introduce SimpleFold, the first flow-matching based protein folding model that solely uses general purpose transformer blocks. Protein folding models typically employ computationally expensive modules involving triangular updates, explicit pair representations or multiple training objectives curated for this specific domain. Instead, SimpleFold employs standard transformer blocks with adaptive layers and is trained via a generative flow-matching objective with an additional structural term. We scale SimpleFold to 3B parameters and train it on approximately 9M distilled protein structures together with experimental PDB data. On standard folding benchmarks, SimpleFold-3B achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, in addition SimpleFold demonstrates strong performance in ensemble prediction which is typically difficult for models trained via deterministic reconstruction objectives. Due to its general-purpose architecture, SimpleFold shows efficiency in deployment and inference on consumer-level hardware. SimpleFold challenges the reliance on complex domain-specific architectures designs in protein folding, opening up an alternative design space for future progress.
HeLoFusion: An Efficient and Scalable Encoder for Modeling Heterogeneous and Multi-Scale Interactions in Trajectory Prediction
Wei, Bingqing, Chen, Lianmin, Xia, Zhongyu, Wang, Yongtao
Multi-agent trajectory prediction in autonomous driving requires a comprehensive understanding of complex social dynamics. Existing methods, however, often struggle to capture the full richness of these dynamics, particularly the co-existence of multi-scale interactions and the diverse behaviors of heterogeneous agents. To address these challenges, this paper introduces HeLoFusion, an efficient and scalable encoder for modeling heterogeneous and multi-scale agent interactions. Instead of relying on global context, HeLoFusion constructs local, multi-scale graphs centered on each agent, allowing it to effectively model both direct pairwise dependencies and complex group-wise interactions (\textit{e.g.}, platooning vehicles or pedestrian crowds). Furthermore, HeLoFusion tackles the critical challenge of agent heterogeneity through an aggregation-decomposition message-passing scheme and type-specific feature networks, enabling it to learn nuanced, type-dependent interaction patterns. This locality-focused approach enables a principled representation of multi-level social context, yielding powerful and expressive agent embeddings. On the challenging Waymo Open Motion Dataset, HeLoFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance, setting new benchmarks for key metrics including Soft mAP and minADE. Our work demonstrates that a locality-grounded architecture, which explicitly models multi-scale and heterogeneous interactions, is a highly effective strategy for advancing motion forecasting.
That's So FETCH: Fashioning Ensemble Techniques for LLM Classification in Civil Legal Intake and Referral
Each year millions of people seek help for their legal problems by calling a legal aid program hotline, walking into a legal aid office, or using a lawyer referral service. The first step to match them to the right help is to identify the legal problem the applicant is experiencing. Misdirection has consequences. Applicants may miss a deadline, experience physical abuse, lose housing or lose custody of children while waiting to connect to the right legal help. We introduce and evaluate the FETCH classifier for legal issue classification and describe two methods for improving accuracy: a hybrid LLM/ML ensemble classification method, and the automatic generation of follow-up questions to enrich the initial problem narrative. We employ a novel data set of 419 real-world queries to a nonprofit lawyer referral service. Ultimately, we show classification accuracy (hits@2) of 97.37\% using a mix of inexpensive models, exceeding the performance of the current state-of-the-art GPT-5 model. Our approach shows promise in significantly reducing the cost of guiding users of the legal system to the right resource for their problem while achieving high accuracy.
Vevo2: A Unified and Controllable Framework for Speech and Singing Voice Generation
Zhang, Xueyao, Zhang, Junan, Wang, Yuancheng, Wang, Chaoren, Chen, Yuanzhe, Jia, Dongya, Chen, Zhuo, Wu, Zhizheng
Controllable human voice generation, particularly for expressive domains like singing, remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces Vevo2, a unified framework for controllable speech and singing voice generation. To tackle issues like the scarcity of annotated singing data and to enable flexible controllability, Vevo2 introduces two audio tokenizers: (1) a unified music-notation-free prosody tokenizer that captures prosody and melody from speech, singing, and even instrumental sounds, and (2) a unified content-style tokenizer that encodes linguistic content, prosody, and style for both speech and singing, while enabling timbre disentanglement. Vevo2 consists of an auto-regressive (AR) content-style modeling stage, which aims to enable controllability over text, prosody, and style, as well as a flow-matching acoustic modeling stage that allows for timbre control. Particularly, during the speech-singing joint training of the AR model, we propose both explicit and implicit prosody learning strategies to bridge speech and singing voice. Moreover, to further enhance the Vevo2's ability to follow text and prosody, we design a multi-objective post-training task that integrates both intelligibility and prosody similarity alignment. Experimental results show that the unified modeling in Vevo2 brings mutual benefits to both speech and singing voice generation. Additionally, Vevo2's effectiveness across a wide range of synthesis, conversion, and editing tasks for both speech and singing further demonstrates its strong generalization ability and versatility. Audio samples are are available at https://versasinger.github.io/.