In this work we study how explicit world-modeling objectives affect the internal representations and downstream capability of Transformers across different training stages. We use a controlled 2x2x2 Rubik's Cube and ask: (1) how does explicitly pretraining a world model affect the model's latent representations, and (2) how does world-model quality affect the model's performance after reinforcement learning post-training? We compare standard next-token prediction to two explicit world-modeling strategies -- (i) state-prediction pretraining and (ii) a joint state-prediction + next-token objective -- and assess task performance after Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is applied as post-training. We evaluate the representation quality with linear probes and causal interventions. We find that explicit world-modeling yields more linearly decodable and causally steerable state representations. More importantly, we find that improved state representations lead to higher gains for GRPO, especially on harder cube states. Our results indicate that sharpening state representations can improve the effectiveness of post-training for sequence-planning tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved remarkable progress in robotic manipulation, yet they remain limited in failure diagnosis and learning from failures. Additionally, existing failure datasets are mostly generated programmatically in simulation, which limits their generalization to the real world. In light of these, we introduce ViFailback, a framework designed to diagnose robotic manipulation failures and provide both textual and visual correction guidance. Our framework utilizes explicit visual symbols to enhance annotation efficiency. We further release the ViFailback dataset, a large-scale collection of 58,126 Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs along with their corresponding 5,202 real-world manipulation trajectories. Based on the dataset, we establish ViFailback-Bench, a benchmark of 11 fine-grained VQA tasks designed to assess the failure diagnosis and correction abilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), featuring ViFailback-Bench Lite for closed-ended and ViFailback-Bench Hard for open-ended evaluation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we built the ViFailback-8B VLM, which not only achieves significant overall performance improvement on ViFailback-Bench but also generates visual symbols for corrective action guidance. Finally, by integrating ViFailback-8B with a VLA model, we conduct real-world robotic experiments demonstrating its ability to assist the VLA model in recovering from failures. Project Website: https://x1nyuzhou.github.io/vifailback.github.io/

As intelligence increases, so does its shadow. AI deception, in which systems induce false beliefs to secure self-beneficial outcomes, has evolved from a speculative concern to an empirically demonstrated risk across language models, AI agents, and emerging frontier systems. This project provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the AI deception field, covering its core concepts, methodologies, genesis, and potential mitigations. First, we identify a formal definition of AI deception, grounded in signaling theory from studies of animal deception. We then review existing empirical studies and associated risks, highlighting deception as a sociotechnical safety challenge. We organize the landscape of AI deception research as a deception cycle, consisting of two key components: deception emergence and deception treatment. Deception emergence reveals the mechanisms underlying AI deception: systems with sufficient capability and incentive potential inevitably engage in deceptive behaviors when triggered by external conditions. Deception treatment, in turn, focuses on detecting and addressing such behaviors. On deception emergence, we analyze incentive foundations across three hierarchical levels and identify three essential capability preconditions required for deception. We further examine contextual triggers, including supervision gaps, distributional shifts, and environmental pressures. On deception treatment, we conclude detection methods covering benchmarks and evaluation protocols in static and interactive settings. Building on the three core factors of deception emergence, we outline potential mitigation strategies and propose auditing approaches that integrate technical, community, and governance efforts to address sociotechnical challenges and future AI risks. To support ongoing work in this area, we release a living resource at www.deceptionsurvey.com.

The current remote sensing image analysis task is increasingly evolving from traditional object recognition to complex intelligence reasoning, which places higher requirements on the model's reasoning ability and the flexibility of tool invocation. T o this end, we propose a new multimodal agent framework, Vision-Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Framework (VICoT), which implements explicit multi-round reasoning by dynamically incorporating visual tools into the chain of thought. Through a stack-based reasoning structure and a modular MCP-compatible tool suite, VICoT enables LLMs to efficiently perform multi-round, interleaved vision-language reasoning tasks with strong generalization and flexibility.W e also propose the Reasoning Stack distillation method to migrate complex Agent behaviors to small, lightweight models, which ensures the reasoning capability while significantly reducing complexity. Experiments on multiple remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate that VICoT significantly outperforms existing SOTA frameworks in reasoning transparency, execution efficiency, and generation quality.

Language models have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex multi-step reasoning tasks. However, their evaluation has been predominantly confined to high-resource languages such as English. In this paper, we introduce a manually translated Bangla multi-step reasoning dataset derived from the English Reveal dataset, featuring both binary and non-binary question types. We conduct a controlled evaluation of English-centric and Bangla-centric multilingual small language models on the original dataset and our translated version to compare their ability to exploit relevant reasoning steps to produce correct answers. Our results show that, in comparable settings, reasoning context is beneficial for more challenging non-binary questions, but models struggle to employ relevant Bangla reasoning steps effectively. We conclude by exploring how reasoning steps contribute to models' predictions, highlighting different trends across models and languages.

Autonomous driving technology is spearheading a transformation in the global automotive industries, and its safe and reliable implementation is the core prerequisite for large-scale adoption (Ren et al., 2025). Comprehensive testing and evaluation of autonomous driving systems (ADSs) are essential to ensuring their safety, in which the identification and generation of safety-critical scenarios represent a core challenge (Yang et al., 2025). "Safety-critical scenarios" specifically refer to rare driving situations with potentially high risks (Ding et al., 2023). Conducting tests under such scenarios enables effective evaluation of the ADSs' safety performance, as well as the clarification and iterative refinement of its Operational Design Domain (ODD). However, due to the rarity of safety-critical scenarios in naturalistic driving environments (Feng et al., 2023), real-world road testing is inefficient and cost-prohibitive, making it unsuitable for large-scale testing of high-level ADSs. As a more efficient and practical solution, simulation-based testing has garnered significant industrial and scholarly attention (Sun et al., 2022). In recent years, engineers in enterprises generally extract safety-critical testing scenarios by directly replaying vehicle-collected data in simulation environments (Liu et al., 2024), while some researchers achieve accelerated sampling of safety-critical scenarios through optimization-based search within a predefined scenario parameter space (Wu et al., 2024, 2026). However, the background vehicles (BVs) in the safety-critical testing scenarios generated by the aforementioned methods exhibit fixed behaviors and cannot dynamically respond to the actions of the vehicle under test (VUT). As a remedy, some other studies have introduced reinforcement learning to train adversarial BV driver models, thereby constructing naturalistic adversarial driving environments (NADE) (Feng et al., 2021) or evolving scenarios (Ma et al., 2024; Wu et al., 2025).

Reasoning-centric video object segmentation is an inherently complex task: the query often refers to dynamics, causality, and temporal interactions, rather than static appearances. Yet existing solutions generally collapse these factors into simplified reasoning with latent embeddings, rendering the reasoning chain opaque and essentially intractable. We therefore adopt an explicit decomposition perspective and introduce ReVSeg, which executes reasoning as sequential decisions in the native interface of pretrained vision language models (VLMs). Rather than folding all reasoning into a single-step prediction, ReVSeg executes three explicit operations -- semantics interpretation, temporal evidence selection, and spatial grounding -- aligning pretrained capabilities. We further employ reinforcement learning to optimize the multi-step reasoning chain, enabling the model to self-refine its decision quality from outcome-driven signals. Experimental results demonstrate that ReVSeg attains state-of-the-art performances on standard video object segmentation benchmarks and yields interpretable reasoning trajectories. Project page is available at https://clementine24.github.io/ReVSeg/ .

Stock price prediction is challenging due to market volatility and its sensitivity to real-time events. While large language models (LLMs) offer new avenues for text-based forecasting, their application in finance is hindered by noisy news data and the lack of explicit answers in text. General-purpose memory architectures struggle to identify the key drivers of price movements. To address this, we propose StockMem, an event-reflection dual-layer memory framework. It structures news into events and mines them along two dimensions: horizontal consolidation integrates daily events, while longitudinal tracking captures event evolution to extract incremental information reflecting market expectation discrepancies. This builds a temporal event knowledge base. By analyzing event-price dynamics, the framework further forms a reflection knowledge base of causal experiences. For prediction, it retrieves analogous historical scenarios and reasons with current events, incremental data, and past experiences. Experiments show StockMem outperforms existing memory architectures and provides superior, explainable reasoning by tracing the information chain affecting prices, enhancing decision transparency in financial forecasting.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in integrating visual perception with language understanding. However, effective multimodal reasoning requires both accurate perception and robust reasoning, and weakness in either limits the performance of VLMs. Prior efforts to enhance reasoning often depend on high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) data, obtained via labor-intensive human annotations, costly proprietary models, or self-training methods that overlook perception. To address these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective self-training framework called See-Think-Learn (STL). At its core, STL introduces a structured reasoning template that encourages the model to see before thinking, first extracting visual attributes in textual form, then using them to guide reasoning. The framework jointly improves perception and reasoning by having the model generate and learn from its own structured rationales in a self-training loop. Furthermore, we augment the training data with negative rationales, i.e. explanations that justify why certain answer choices are incorrect, to enhance the model's ability to distinguish between correct and misleading responses. This fosters more discriminative and robust learning. Experiments across diverse domains show that STL consistently outperforms baselines trained directly only on answers or self-generated reasoning, while qualitative analysis confirms the high quality of its rationales. STL thus provides a cost-effective solution to enhance multimodal reasoning ability of VLMs.

Recent advances in general-purpose AI systems with attention-based transformers offer a potential window into how the neocortex and cerebellum, despite their relatively uniform circuit architectures, give rise to diverse functions and, ultimately, to human intelligence. This Perspective provides a cross-domain comparison between the brain and AI that goes beyond the traditional focus on visual processing, adopting the emerging perspecive of world-model-based computation. Here, we identify shared computational mechanisms in the attention-based neocortex and the non-attentional cerebellum: both predict future world events from past inputs and construct internal world models through prediction-error learning. These predictive world models are repurposed for seemingly distinct functions -- understanding in sensory processing and generation in motor processing -- enabling the brain to achieve multi-domain capabilities and human-like adaptive intelligence. Notably, attention-based AI has independently converged on a similar learning paradigm and world-model-based computation. We conclude that these shared mechanisms in both biological and artificial systems constitute a core computational foundation for realizing diverse functions including high-level intelligence, despite their relatively uniform circuit structures. Our theoretical insights bridge neuroscience and AI, advancing our understanding of the computational essence of intelligence.