Problem Solving
A*-Thought: Efficient Reasoning via Bidirectional Compression for Low-Resource Settings
Xu, Xiaoang, Wang, Shuo, Han, Xu, Liu, Zhenghao, Wu, Huijia, Li, Peipei, Liu, Zhiyuan, Sun, Maosong, He, Zhaofeng
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve superior performance by extending the thought length. However, a lengthy thinking trajectory leads to reduced efficiency. Most of the existing methods are stuck in the assumption of overthinking and attempt to reason efficiently by compressing the Chain-of-Thought, but this often leads to performance degradation. To address this problem, we introduce A*-Thought, an efficient tree search-based unified framework designed to identify and isolate the most essential thoughts from the extensive reasoning chains produced by these models. It formulates the reasoning process of LRMs as a search tree, where each node represents a reasoning span in the giant reasoning space. By combining the A* search algorithm with a cost function specific to the reasoning path, it can efficiently compress the chain of thought and determine a reasoning path with high information density and low cost. In addition, we also propose a bidirectional importance estimation mechanism, which further refines this search process and enhances its efficiency beyond uniform sampling. Extensive experiments on several advanced math tasks show that A*-Thought effectively balances performance and efficiency over a huge search space. Specifically, A*-Thought can improve the performance of QwQ-32B by 2.39$\times$ with low-budget and reduce the length of the output token by nearly 50% with high-budget. The proposed method is also compatible with several other LRMs, demonstrating its generalization capability. The code can be accessed at: https://github.com/AI9Stars/AStar-Thought.
DETree: DEtecting Human-AI Collaborative Texts via Tree-Structured Hierarchical Representation Learning
He, Yongxin, Zhang, Shan, Cao, Yixuan, Ma, Lei, Luo, Ping
Detecting AI-involved text is essential for combating misinformation, plagiarism, and academic misconduct. However, AI text generation includes diverse collaborative processes (AI-written text edited by humans, human-written text edited by AI, and AI-generated text refined by other AI), where various or even new LLMs could be involved. Texts generated through these varied processes exhibit complex characteristics, presenting significant challenges for detection. Current methods model these processes rather crudely, primarily employing binary classification (purely human vs. AI-involved) or multi-classification (treating human-AI collaboration as a new class). We observe that representations of texts generated through different processes exhibit inherent clustering relationships. Therefore, we propose DETree, a novel approach that models the relationships among different processes as a Hierarchical Affinity Tree structure, and introduces a specialized loss function that aligns text representations with this tree. To facilitate this learning, we developed RealBench, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that automatically incorporates a wide spectrum of hybrid texts produced through various human-AI collaboration processes. Our method improves performance in hybrid text detection tasks and significantly enhances robustness and generalization in out-of-distribution scenarios, particularly in few-shot learning conditions, further demonstrating the promise of training-based approaches in OOD settings. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/heyongxin233/DETree.
GACO-CAD: Geometry-Augmented and Conciseness-Optimized CAD Model Generation from Single Image
Wang, Yinghui, Zhang, Xinyu, Du, Peng
Generating editable, parametric CAD models from a single image holds great potential to lower the barriers of industrial concept design. However, current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) still struggle with accurately inferring 3D geometry from 2D images due to limited spatial reasoning capabilities. We address this limitation by introducing GACO-CAD, a novel two-stage post-training framework. It is designed to achieve a joint objective: simultaneously improving the geometric accuracy of the generated CAD models and encouraging the use of more concise modeling procedures. First, during supervised fine-tuning, we leverage depth and surface normal maps as dense geometric priors, combining them with the RGB image to form a multi-channel input. In the context of single-view reconstruction, these priors provide complementary spatial cues that help the MLLM more reliably recover 3D geometry from 2D observations. Second, during reinforcement learning, we introduce a group length reward that, while preserving high geometric fidelity, promotes the generation of more compact and less redundant parametric modeling sequences. A simple dynamic weighting strategy is adopted to stabilize training. Experiments on the DeepCAD and Fusion360 datasets show that GACO-CAD achieves state-of-the-art performance under the same MLLM backbone, consistently outperforming existing methods in terms of code validity, geometric accuracy, and modeling conciseness.
Planner and Executor: Collaboration between Discrete Diffusion And Autoregressive Models in Reasoning
Berrayana, Lina, Heakl, Ahmed, Sohail, Muhammad Abdullah, Hofmann, Thomas, Khan, Salman, Chen, Wei
Current autoregressive language models (ARMs) achieve high accuracy but require long token sequences, making them costly. Discrete diffusion language models (DDLMs) enable parallel and flexible generation within a fixed number of steps and have recently emerged for their strong performance in complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We present a study exploring hybrid architectures that couple DDLMs with ARMs to assess whether their collaboration can yield complementary benefits. We first examine collaboration in text space, where one model plans the reasoning process and another executes the final answer based on that plan. We then extend this setup to latent-space communication, introducing a learned projector that maps DDLM latents into the ARM's embedding space, potentially bypassing some of the text-generation limitations of diffusion models. We find that shifting DDLM --> ARM communication from text space to latent space yields significant accuracy gains, for example increasing from 27.0% to 54.0% on DART-5 and from 0.0% to 14.0% on AIME24. We also find that combining a DDLM planner with an ARM executor can provide substantial computational savings with little to no impact on accuracy. For example, the latent-space pipeline, using 64 tokens for planning and roughly 5 for execution, surpasses Qwen3.1-7B on DART-5 and AIME, despite Qwen using 44 times more tokens. Overall, our study offers new insights into reasoning with DDLMs and highlights their potential in hybrid architectures.
From Next Token Prediction to (STRIPS) World Models -- Preliminary Results
Nรบรฑez-Molina, Carlos, Gรณmez, Vicenรง, Geffner, Hector
We consider the problem of learning propositional STRIPS world models from action traces alone, using a deep learning architecture (transformers) and gradient descent. The task is cast as a supervised next token prediction problem where the tokens are the actions, and an action $a$ may follow an action sequence if the hidden effects of the previous actions do not make an action precondition of $a$ false. We show that a suitable transformer architecture can faithfully represent propositional STRIPS world models, and that the models can be learned from sets of random valid (positive) and invalid (negative) action sequences alone. A number of experiments are reported.
From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery
Wei, Jiaqi, Yang, Yuejin, Zhang, Xiang, Chen, Yuhan, Zhuang, Xiang, Gao, Zhangyang, Zhou, Dongzhan, Wang, Guangshuai, Gao, Zhiqiang, Cao, Juntai, Qiu, Zijie, Hu, Ming, Ma, Chenglong, Tang, Shixiang, He, Junjun, Song, Chunfeng, He, Xuming, Zhang, Qiang, You, Chenyu, Zheng, Shuangjia, Ding, Ning, Ouyang, Wanli, Dong, Nanqing, Cheng, Yu, Sun, Siqi, Bai, Lei, Zhou, Bowen
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific discovery, evolving from specialized computational tools into autonomous research partners. We position Agentic Science as a pivotal stage within the broader AI for Science paradigm, where AI systems progress from partial assistance to full scientific agency. Enabled by large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, and integrated research platforms, agentic AI shows capabilities in hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and iterative refinement -- behaviors once regarded as uniquely human. This survey provides a domain-oriented review of autonomous scientific discovery across life sciences, chemistry, materials science, and physics. We unify three previously fragmented perspectives -- process-oriented, autonomy-oriented, and mechanism-oriented -- through a comprehensive framework that connects foundational capabilities, core processes, and domain-specific realizations. Building on this framework, we (i) trace the evolution of AI for Science, (ii) identify five core capabilities underpinning scientific agency, (iii) model discovery as a dynamic four-stage workflow, (iv) review applications across the above domains, and (v) synthesize key challenges and future opportunities. This work establishes a domain-oriented synthesis of autonomous scientific discovery and positions Agentic Science as a structured paradigm for advancing AI-driven research.
REASONING GYM: Reasoning Environments for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards
Stojanovski, Zafir, Stanley, Oliver, Sharratt, Joe, Jones, Richard, Adefioye, Abdulhakeem, Kaddour, Jean, Kรถpf, Andreas
We introduce Reasoning Gym (RG), a library of reasoning environments for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. It provides over 100 data generators and verifiers spanning multiple domains including algebra, arithmetic, computation, cognition, geometry, graph theory, logic, and various common games. Its key innovation is the ability to generate virtually infinite training data with adjustable complexity, unlike most previous reasoning datasets, which are typically fixed. This procedural generation approach allows for continuous evaluation across varying difficulty levels. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of RG in both evaluating and reinforcement learning of reasoning models.
Towards Interpretable and Trustworthy Time Series Reasoning: A BlueSky Vision
Ning, Kanghui, Pan, Zijie, Jiang, Yushan, Schneider, Anderson, Nevmyvaka, Yuriy, Song, Dongjin
Time series reasoning is emerging as the next frontier in temporal analysis, aiming to move beyond pattern recognition towards explicit, interpretable, and trustworthy inference. This paper presents a BlueSky vision built on two complementary directions. One builds robust foundations for time series reasoning, centered on comprehensive temporal understanding, structured multi-step reasoning, and faithful evaluation frameworks. The other advances system-level reasoning, moving beyond language-only explanations by incorporating multi-agent collaboration, multi-modal context, and retrieval-augmented approaches. Together, these directions outline a flexible and extensible framework for advancing time series reasoning, aiming to deliver interpretable and trustworthy temporal intelligence across diverse domains.
VAGEN: Reinforcing World Model Reasoning for Multi-Turn VLM Agents
Wang, Kangrui, Zhang, Pingyue, Wang, Zihan, Gao, Yaning, Li, Linjie, Wang, Qineng, Chen, Hanyang, Wan, Chi, Lu, Yiping, Yang, Zhengyuan, Wang, Lijuan, Krishna, Ranjay, Wu, Jiajun, Fei-Fei, Li, Choi, Yejin, Li, Manling
A key challenge in training Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents, compared to Language Model (LLM) agents, lies in the shift from textual states to complex visual observations. This transition introduces partial observability and demands robust world modeling. We ask: Can VLM agents construct internal world models through explicit visual state reasoning? To address this question, we architecturally enforce and reward the agent's reasoning process via reinforcement learning (RL), formulating it as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). We find that decomposing the agent's reasoning into State Estimation ("what is the current state?") and Transition Modeling ("what comes next?") is critical for success, as demonstrated through five reasoning strategies. Our investigation into how agents represent internal beliefs reveals that the optimal representation is task-dependent: Natural Language excels at capturing semantic relationships in general tasks, while Structured formats are indispensable for precise manipulation and control. Building on these insights, we design a World Modeling Reward that provides dense, turn-level supervision for accurate state prediction, and introduce Bi-Level General Advantage Estimation (Bi-Level GAE) for turn-aware credit assignment. Through this form of visual state reasoning, a 3B-parameter model achieves a score of 0.82 across five diverse agent benchmarks, representing a 3$\times$ improvement over its untrained counterpart (0.21) and outperforming proprietary reasoning models such as GPT-5 (0.75), Gemini 2.5 Pro (0.67) and Claude 4.5 (0.62). All experiments are conducted within our VAGEN framework, a scalable system for training and analyzing multi-turn VLM agents in diverse visual environments. Code and data are publicly available at https://vagen-ai.github.io.
SNOMED CT-powered Knowledge Graphs for Structured Clinical Data and Diagnostic Reasoning
Liu, Dun, Pang, Qin, Liu, Guangai, Mou, Hongyu, Fan, Jipeng, Miao, Yiming, Ho, Pin-Han, Peng, Limei
The effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is significantly hindered by unstructured clinical documentation, which results in noisy, inconsistent, and logically fragmented training data. To address this challenge, we present a knowledge-driven framework that integrates the standardized clinical terminology SNOMED CT with the Neo4j graph database to construct a structured medical knowledge graph. In this graph, clinical entities such as diseases, symptoms, and medications are represented as nodes, and semantic relationships such as ``caused by,'' ``treats,'' and ``belongs to'' are modeled as edges in Neo4j, with types mapped from formal SNOMED CT relationship concepts (e.g., \texttt{Causative agent}, \texttt{Indicated for}). This design enables multi-hop reasoning and ensures terminological consistency. By extracting and standardizing entity-relationship pairs from clinical texts, we generate structured, JSON-formatted datasets that embed explicit diagnostic pathways. These datasets are used to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), significantly improving the clinical logic consistency of their outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that our knowledge-guided approach enhances the validity and interpretability of AI-generated diagnostic reasoning, providing a scalable solution for building reliable AI-assisted clinical systems.