The limited reasoning capabilities of small language models (SLMs) cast doubt on their suitability for tasks demanding deep, multi-step logical deduction. This paper introduces a framework called Small Reasons, Large Hints (SMART), which selectively augments SLM reasoning with targeted guidance from large language models (LLMs). Inspired by the concept of cognitive scaffolding, SMART employs a score-based evaluation to identify uncertain reasoning steps and injects corrective LLM-generated reasoning only when necessary. By framing structured reasoning as an optimal policy search, our approach steers the reasoning trajectory toward correct solutions without exhaustive sampling. Our experiments on mathematical reasoning datasets demonstrate that targeted external scaffolding significantly improves performance, paving the way for collaborative use of both SLM and LLM to tackle complex reasoning tasks that are currently unsolvable by SLMs alone.

World models aim to learn action-controlled future prediction and have proven essential for the development of intelligent agents. However, most existing world models rely heavily on substantial action-labeled data and costly training, making it challenging to adapt to novel environments with heterogeneous actions through limited interactions. This limitation can hinder their applicability across broader domains. To overcome this limitation, we propose AdaWorld, an innovative world model learning approach that enables efficient adaptation. The key idea is to incorporate action information during the pretraining of world models. This is achieved by extracting latent actions from videos in a self-supervised manner, capturing the most critical transitions between frames. We then develop an autoregressive world model that conditions on these latent actions. This learning paradigm enables highly adaptable world models, facilitating efficient transfer and learning of new actions even with limited interactions and finetuning. Our comprehensive experiments across multiple environments demonstrate that AdaWorld achieves superior performance in both simulation quality and visual planning.

We introduce PHYSICS, a comprehensive benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. It contains 1297 expert-annotated problems covering six core areas: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, electromagnetism, atomic physics, and optics. Each problem requires advanced physics knowledge and mathematical reasoning. We develop a robust automated evaluation system for precise and reliable validation. Our evaluation of leading foundation models reveals substantial limitations. Even the most advanced model, o3-mini, achieves only 59.9% accuracy, highlighting significant challenges in solving high-level scientific problems. Through comprehensive error analysis, exploration of diverse prompting strategies, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based knowledge augmentation, we identify key areas for improvement, laying the foundation for future advancements.

We study the challenging problem of unsupervised multi-object segmentation on single images. Existing methods, which rely on image reconstruction objectives to learn objectness or leverage pretrained image features to group similar pixels, often succeed only in segmenting simple synthetic objects or discovering a limited number of real-world objects. In this paper, we introduce unMORE, a novel two-stage pipeline designed to identify many complex objects in real-world images. The key to our approach involves explicitly learning three levels of carefully defined object-centric representations in the first stage. Subsequently, our multi-object reasoning module utilizes these learned object priors to discover multiple objects in the second stage. Notably, this reasoning module is entirely network-free and does not require human labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that unMORE significantly outperforms all existing unsupervised methods across 6 real-world benchmark datasets, including the challenging COCO dataset, achieving state-of-the-art object segmentation results. Remarkably, our method excels in crowded images where all baselines collapse.

Language models (LMs) require robust episodic grounding-the capacity to learn from and apply past experiences-to excel at physical planning tasks. Current episodic grounding approaches struggle with scalability and integration, limiting their effectiveness, especially for medium-sized LMs (7B parameters). While larger LMs (70-405B parameters) possess superior hierarchical representations and extensive pre-trained knowledge, they encounter a fundamental scale paradox: despite their advanced abstraction capabilities, they lack efficient mechanisms to leverage experience streams. We propose a scalable weak-to-strong episodic learning framework that effectively transfers episodic behaviors from smaller to larger LMs. This framework integrates Monte Carlo tree search for structured experience collection with a novel distillation method, preserving the inherent LM capabilities while embedding episodic memory. Experiments demonstrate our method surpasses state-of-the-art proprietary LMs by 3.45% across diverse planning and question-answering tasks. Layer-wise probing further indicates significant improvements in task alignment, especially within deeper LM layers, highlighting stable generalization even for previously unseen scenarios with increased planning complexity-conditions where baseline methods degrade markedly.

Theory-of-Mind (ToM) enables humans to infer mental states-such as beliefs, desires, and intentions-forming the foundation of social cognition. However, existing computational ToM methods rely on structured workflows with ToM-specific priors or deep model fine-tuning, which struggle with scalability in multimodal environments and fail to generalize as task complexity increases. To address these limitations, we propose a scalable Bayesian ToM planner that decomposes ToM reasoning into stepwise Bayesian updates. Our framework introduces weak-to-strong control, allowing smaller language models (LMs) to specialize in ToM-specific likelihood estimation and transfer their reasoning behaviors to larger LMs (7B to 405B) for integration with social and world knowledge. This synergistic approach aligns large-model inference of human mental states with Bayesian principles. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves a 4.6% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art techniques on multimodal ToM benchmarks, including challenging unseen scenarios, thereby establishing a new standard for modeling human mental states in complex environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across various scenarios due to their exceptional reasoning capabilities and natural language understanding. While LLMs demonstrate strong performance in tasks involving mathematics and coding, their effectiveness diminishes significantly when applied to chemistry-related problems. Chemistry problems typically involve long and complex reasoning steps, which contain specific terminology, including specialized symbol systems and complex nomenclature conventions. These characteristics often cause general LLMs to experience hallucinations during the reasoning process due to their lack of specific knowledge. However, existing methods are struggling to effectively leverage chemical expertise and formulas. Moreover, current uncertainty estimation methods, designed to mitigate potential reasoning errors, are unable to precisely identify specific steps or key knowledge. In this work, we propose a novel framework called ChemAU, which incorporates our adaptive uncertainty estimation method that applies different uncertainty values based on the position of reasoning steps within the whole reasoning chain. Leveraging this method, ChemAU identifies gaps in chemistry knowledge and precisely supplements chemical expertise with the specialized domain model, thereby correcting and updating the previously flawed reasoning chain. Our experiments with three popular LLMs across three chemistry datasets demonstrate that ChemAU significantly enhances both reasoning accuracy and uncertainty estimation.

Despite notable advancements in multimodal reasoning, leading Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still underperform on vision-centric multimodal reasoning tasks in general scenarios. This shortfall stems from their predominant reliance on logic- and knowledge-based slow thinking strategies, while effective for domains like math and science, fail to integrate visual information effectively during reasoning. Consequently, these models often fail to adequately ground visual cues, resulting in suboptimal performance in tasks that require multiple plausible visual interpretations and inferences. To address this, we present GThinker (General Thinker), a novel reasoning MLLM excelling in multimodal reasoning across general scenarios, mathematics, and science. GThinker introduces Cue-Rethinking, a flexible reasoning pattern that grounds inferences in visual cues and iteratively reinterprets these cues to resolve inconsistencies. Building on this pattern, we further propose a two-stage training pipeline, including pattern-guided cold start and incentive reinforcement learning, designed to enable multimodal reasoning capabilities across domains. Furthermore, to support the training, we construct GThinker-11K, comprising 7K high-quality, iteratively-annotated reasoning paths and 4K curated reinforcement learning samples, filling the data gap toward general multimodal reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GThinker achieves 81.5% on the challenging comprehensive multimodal reasoning benchmark M$^3$CoT, surpassing the latest O4-mini model. It also shows an average improvement of 2.1% on general scenario multimodal reasoning benchmarks, while maintaining on-par performance in mathematical reasoning compared to counterpart advanced reasoning models. The code, model, and data will be released soon at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/GThinker.

Automatically generating high-quality mathematical problems that align with educational objectives is a crucial task in NLP-based educational technology. Traditional generation methods focus primarily on textual quality, but they often overlook educational objectives. Moreover, these methods address only single-dimensional, simple question generation, failing to meet complex, multifaceted educational requirements. To address these challenges, we constructed and annotated EduMath, a dataset of 16k mathematical questions with multi-dimensional educational objectives. Based on this dataset, we developed EQGEVAL, which incorporates three evaluation dimensions and is designed to assess the ability of models to generate educational questions. Drawing inspiration from teachers' problem design processes, we propose the Educational Question Planning with self-Reflection (EQPR) method for educational mathematical question generation, following a "plan-evaluate-optimize" approach. Specifically, by combining planning algorithm based on Monte Carlo Tree Search with the generative capabilities of Large Language Models, we continuously optimize questions through iterative feedback. This self-optimization mechanism ensures that the generated questions both fit the educational context and strategically achieve specific basic educational objectives. Through extensive experiments based on EQGEVAL, we have demonstrated that EQPR achieves significant improvements in generating questions that meet multi-dimensional educational objectives.

The accelerating development of general medical artificial intelligence (GMAI), powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), offers transformative potential for addressing persistent healthcare challenges, including workforce deficits and escalating costs. The parallel development of systematic evaluation benchmarks emerges as a critical imperative to enable performance assessment and provide technological guidance. Meanwhile, as an invaluable knowledge source, the potential of medical textbooks for benchmark development remains underexploited. Here, we present MedBookVQA, a systematic and comprehensive multimodal benchmark derived from open-access medical textbooks. To curate this benchmark, we propose a standardized pipeline for automated extraction of medical figures while contextually aligning them with corresponding medical narratives. Based on this curated data, we generate 5,000 clinically relevant questions spanning modality recognition, disease classification, anatomical identification, symptom diagnosis, and surgical procedures. A multi-tier annotation system categorizes queries through hierarchical taxonomies encompassing medical imaging modalities (42 categories), body anatomies (125 structures), and clinical specialties (31 departments), enabling nuanced analysis across medical subdomains. We evaluate a wide array of MLLMs, including proprietary, open-sourced, medical, and reasoning models, revealing significant performance disparities across task types and model categories. Our findings highlight critical capability gaps in current GMAI systems while establishing textbook-derived multimodal benchmarks as essential evaluation tools. MedBookVQA establishes textbook-derived benchmarking as a critical paradigm for advancing clinical AI, exposing limitations in GMAI systems while providing anatomically structured performance metrics across specialties.