Problem Solving
Cognifying Education: Mapping AI's transformative role in emotional, creative, and collaborative learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping educational practice, challenging long held assumptions about teaching and learning. This article integrates conceptual perspectives from recent books (Genesis by Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger and Craig Mundie, CoIntelligence by Ethan Mollick, and The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly) with empirical insights from popular AI podcasts and Anthropic public releases. We examine seven key domains: emotional support, creativity, contextual understanding, student engagement, problem solving, ethics and morality, and collaboration. For each domain, we explore AI capabilities, opportunities for transformative change, and emerging best practices, drawing equally from theoretical analysis and real world observations. Overall, we find that AI, when used thoughtfully, can complement and enhance human educators in fostering richer learning experiences across cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions. We emphasize an optimistic yet responsible outlook: educators and students should actively shape AI integration to amplify human potential in creativity, ethical reasoning, collaboration, and beyond, while maintaining a focus on human centric values.
APRIL: API Synthesis with Automatic Prompt Optimization and Reinforcement Learning
Zhong, Hua, Jiang, Shan, Khurshid, Sarfraz
APIs are central to modern software development, yet composing new APIs from large libraries is difficult due to the exponential search space; traditional component-based synthesis relies on costly exploration and hand-crafted specifications. While large language models (LLMs) can generate implementations from natural language, hallucinations and limited access to up-to-date contextual information often yield incorrect code. In this paper, we present APRIL, an approach that combines LLM-based synthesis with Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RL VR): APO iteratively refines prompts for a frozen model, while RLVR fine-tunes the policy toward functional correctness, producing an efficient synthesis pipeline. Evaluated on 81 real-world APIs from widely used scientific Python libraries and benchmarked against instruction-tuned but unfine-tuned LLMs guided by expert prompts, APRIL achieves substantial improvements. These results indicate that integrating APO and RLVR provides a robust, scalable path for component-based API synthesis in large libraries.
Dual-Scale World Models for LLM Agents Towards Hard-Exploration Problems
LLM-based agents have seen promising advances, yet they are still limited in "hard-exploration" tasks requiring learning new knowledge through exploration. We present GLoW, a novel approach leveraging dual-scale world models, maintaining a trajectory frontier of high-value discoveries at the global scale, while learning from local trial-and-error in exploration through a Multi-path Advantage Reflection mechanism which infers advantage-based progress signals to guide exploration. To evaluate our framework for hard-exploration, we tackle the Jericho benchmark suite of text-based games, where GLoW achieves a new state-of-theart performance for LLM-based approaches. Compared to state-of-the-art RLbased methods, our approach achieves comparable performance while requiring 100-800x fewer environment interactions.
Explore-Execute Chain: Towards an Efficient Structured Reasoning Paradigm
Yang, Kaisen, He, Lixuan, Shah, Rushi, Yang, Kaicheng, Ma, Qinwei, Liu, Dianbo, Lamb, Alex
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and its variants have markedly advanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their monolithic and auto-regressive architecture inherently conflates high-level strategic planning with low-level step-by-step execution, leading to computational inefficiency, limited exploration of reasoning paths, and reduced interpretability. To overcome these issues, we propose the Explore-Execute Chain ($E^2C$), a structured reasoning framework that decouples reasoning into two distinct phases: an exploratory phase that stochastically generates succinct high-level plans, followed by an execution phase that deterministically carries out the chosen plan. Our approach incorporates a two-stage training methodology, which combines Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) - augmented by a novel data generation algorithm enforcing strict plan adherence - with a subsequent Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage that capitalizes on the informativeness of exploration and reinforces the determinism of execution. This decomposition enables an efficient test-time scaling strategy: on AIME'2024, $E^2C$ Test Time Scaling reaches 58.1% accuracy using <10% of the decoding tokens required by comparable methods (e.g., Forest-of-Thought), sharply cutting self-consistency overhead. For cross-domain adaptation, our Exploration-Focused SFT (EF-SFT) fine-tunes with only 3.5% of the tokens used by standard SFT yet yields up to 14.5% higher accuracy than standard SFT on medical benchmarks, delivering state-of-the-art performance, strong generalization, and greater interpretability by separating planning from execution. The code and pre-trained models for the project are available at: https://github.com/yks23/Explore-Execute-Chain.git
Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review
Sapkota, Ranjan, Karkee, Manoj
The fusion of language and vision in large vision-language models (LVLMs) has revolutionized deep learning-based object detection by enhancing adaptability, contextual reasoning, and generalization beyond traditional architectures. This in-depth review presents a structured exploration of the state-of-the-art in LVLMs, systematically organized through a three-step research review process. First, we discuss the functioning of vision language models (VLMs) for object detection, describing how these models harness natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) techniques to revolutionize object detection and localization. We then explain the architectural innovations, training paradigms, and output flexibility of recent LVLMs for object detection, highlighting how they achieve advanced contextual understanding for object detection. The review thoroughly examines the approaches used in integration of visual and textual information, demonstrating the progress made in object detection using VLMs that facilitate more sophisticated object detection and localization strategies. This review presents comprehensive visualizations demonstrating LVLMs' effectiveness in diverse scenarios including localization and segmentation, and then compares their real-time performance, adaptability, and complexity to traditional deep learning systems. Based on the review, its is expected that LVLMs will soon meet or surpass the performance of conventional methods in object detection. The review also identifies a few major limitations of the current LVLM modes, proposes solutions to address those challenges, and presents a clear roadmap for the future advancement in this field. We conclude, based on this study, that the recent advancement in LVLMs have made and will continue to make a transformative impact on object detection and robotic applications in the future.
Scaling RL to Long Videos
Chen, Yukang, Huang, Wei, Shi, Baifeng, Hu, Qinghao, Ye, Hanrong, Zhu, Ligeng, Liu, Zhijian, Molchanov, Pavlo, Kautz, Jan, Qi, Xiaojuan, Liu, Sifei, Yin, Hongxu, Lu, Yao, Han, Song
We introduce a full-stack framework that scales up reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) to long videos, leveraging reinforcement learning. We address the unique challenges of long video reasoning by integrating three critical components: (1) a large-scale dataset, LongVideo-Reason, comprising 104K long video QA pairs with high-quality reasoning annotations across diverse domains such as sports, games, and vlogs; (2) a two-stage training pipeline that extends VLMs with chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning (CoT-SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL); and (3) a training infrastructure for long video RL, named Multi-modal Reinforcement Sequence Parallelism (MR-SP), which incorporates sequence parallelism and a vLLM-based engine tailored for long video, using cached video embeddings for efficient rollout and prefilling. In our experiments, LongVILA-R1-7B achieves strong performance on video benchmarks, reaching 65.1% and 71.1% accuracy on VideoMME without and with subtitles, respectively, and consistently outperforming LongVILA-7B across multiple benchmarks. Moreover, LongVILA-R1-7B supports processing up to 8,192 video frames per video, and configurable FPS settings. Notably, our MR-SP system achieves up to 2.1x speedup on long video RL training. In addition, we release our training system for public availability that supports RL training on various modalities (video, text, and audio), various models (VILA and Qwen series), and even image and video generation models. On a single A100 node (8 GPUs), it supports RL training on hour-long videos (e.g., 3,600 frames).
TableRAG: A Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for Heterogeneous Document Reasoning
Yu, Xiaohan, Jian, Pu, Chen, Chong
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated considerable effectiveness in open-domain question answering. However, when applied to heterogeneous documents, comprising both textual and tabular components, existing RAG approaches exhibit critical limitations. The prevailing practice of flattening tables and chunking strategies disrupts the intrinsic tabular structure, leads to information loss, and undermines the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop, global queries. To address these challenges, we propose TableRAG, an SQL-based framework that unifies textual understanding and complex manipulations over tabular data. TableRAG iteratively operates in four steps: context-sensitive query decomposition, text retrieval, SQL programming and execution, and compositional intermediate answer generation. We also develop HeteQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-hop heterogeneous reasoning capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that TableRAG consistently outperforms existing baselines on both public datasets and our HeteQA, establishing a new state-of-the-art for heterogeneous document question answering. We release TableRAG at https://github.com/yxh-y/TableRAG/tree/main.
Resisting Contextual Interference in RAG via Parametric-Knowledge Reinforcement
Lin, Chenyu, Wen, Yilin, Su, Du, Tan, Hexiang, Sun, Fei, Chen, Muhan, Bao, Chenfu, Lyu, Zhonghou
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves performance on knowledge-intensive tasks but can be derailed by wrong, irrelevant, or conflicting retrieved text, causing models to rely on inaccurate evidence and cascade errors. We propose Knowledgeable-R1, a reinforcement-learning framework that explicitly trains large language models to use parametric knowledge (PK) to resist contextual interference while still exploiting external context when it is reliably helpful. Knowledgeable-R1 introduces a joint sampling scheme that generates paired responses with and without retrieval, and learns both local advantages (within each decoding regime) and global advantages under the same input to quantify when to ignore misleading context versus adopt it. We employ an asymmetric advantage transformation that amplifies exploratory behaviors toward parametric knowledge. Experiments show that \method significantly improves robustness and reasoning accuracy in knowledge conflict scenarios and general RAG scenarios, outperforming SOTA baselines by 23% in counterfactual scenarios, and without degradation when the retrieved context is fully accurate.Our code are available at https://github.com/lcy80366872/knowledgeable-R1.
WorldGym: World Model as An Environment for Policy Evaluation
Quevedo, Julian, Sharma, Ansh Kumar, Sun, Yixiang, Suryavanshi, Varad, Liang, Percy, Yang, Sherry
Robots can help humans in ways that range from home robots performing chores (Shafiullah et al., With the development of generative models trained on large-scale video data (Ho et al., 2022; Villegas et al., 2022; Singer et al., 2022), recent work has shown that video world models can visually emulate See videos and code at https://world-model-eval.github.io Inspired by this observation, we propose a world-model-based policy evaluation environment (WorldGym), as shown in Figure 1. To enable efficient rollouts of policies which predict different-length action chunks, WorldGym aligns its diffusion horizon length with policies' chunk sizes at inference time. With video rollouts from the world model, WorldGym then uses a vision-language model (VLM) to determine tasks' success We then use the world model to evaluate VLA-based robot policies by rolling out the policies in the world model starting from real initial frames, and compare their success rates (policy values) in WorldGym to those achieved in real-world experiments. We propose flexibly aligning diffusion horizon length with policies' action chunk sizes for efficient We consider a multi-task, finite-horizon, partially observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) (Puterman, 2014; Kaelbling et al., 1995), specified by In this section, we first describe our implementation of world model training and inference.
Automated Model Discovery via Multi-modal & Multi-step Pipeline
Jung-Mok, Lee, Hyeon-Woo, Nam, Ye-Bin, Moon, Nam, Junhyun, Oh, Tae-Hyun
Automated model discovery is the process of automatically searching and identifying the most appropriate model for a given dataset over a large combinatorial search space. Existing approaches, however, often face challenges in balancing the capture of fine-grained details with ensuring generalizability beyond training data regimes with a reasonable model complexity. In this paper, we present a multi-modal \& multi-step pipeline for effective automated model discovery. Our approach leverages two vision-language-based modules (VLM), AnalyzerVLM and EvaluatorVLM, for effective model proposal and evaluation in an agentic way. AnalyzerVLM autonomously plans and executes multi-step analyses to propose effective candidate models. EvaluatorVLM assesses the candidate models both quantitatively and perceptually, regarding the fitness for local details and the generalibility for overall trends. Our results demonstrate that our pipeline effectively discovers models that capture fine details and ensure strong generalizability. Additionally, extensive ablation studies show that both multi-modality and multi-step reasoning play crucial roles in discovering favorable models.