Problem Solving
MorphoBench: A Benchmark with Difficulty Adaptive to Model Reasoning
Wang, Xukai, Liu, Xuanbo, Chen, Mingrui, Zhong, Haitian, Yang, Xuanlin, Zeng, Bohan, Hu, Jinbo, Liang, Hao, Niu, Junbo, Li, Xuchen, Wu, Ruitao, An, Ruichuan, Shi, Yang, Liu, Liu, Zhang, Xu-Yao, Liu, Qiang, Lin, Zhouchen, Zhang, Wentao, Dong, Bin
With the advancement of powerful large-scale reasoning models, effectively evaluating the reasoning capabilities of these models has become increasingly important. However, existing benchmarks designed to assess the reasoning abilities of large models tend to be limited in scope and lack the flexibility to adapt their difficulty according to the evolving reasoning capacities of the models. To address this, we propose MorphoBench, a benchmark that incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. Specifically, we curate the benchmark by selecting and collecting complex reasoning questions from existing benchmarks and sources such as Olympiad-level competitions. Additionally, MorphoBench adaptively modifies the analytical challenge of questions by leveraging key statements generated during the model's reasoning process. Furthermore, it includes questions generated using simulation software, enabling dynamic adjustment of benchmark difficulty with minimal resource consumption. We have gathered over 1,300 test questions and iteratively adjusted the difficulty of MorphoBench based on the reasoning capabilities of models such as o3 and GPT-5. MorphoBench enhances the comprehensiveness and validity of model reasoning evaluation, providing reliable guidance for improving both the reasoning abilities and scientific robustness of large models. The code has been released in https://github.com/OpenDCAI/MorphoBench.
Towards Neurocognitive-Inspired Intelligence: From AI's Structural Mimicry to Human-Like Functional Cognition
Golilarz, Noorbakhsh Amiri, Khatib, Hassan S. Al, Rahimi, Shahram
Artificial intelligence has advanced significantly through deep learning, reinforcement learning, and large language and vision models. However, these systems often remain task specific, struggle to adapt to changing conditions, and cannot generalize in ways similar to human cognition. Additionally, they mainly focus on mimicking brain structures, which often leads to black-box models with limited transparency and adaptability. Inspired by the structure and function of biological cognition, this paper introduces the concept of "Neurocognitive-Inspired Intelligence (NII)," a hybrid approach that combines neuroscience, cognitive science, computer vision, and AI to develop more general, adaptive, and robust intelligent systems capable of rapid learning, learning from less data, and leveraging prior experience. These systems aim to emulate the human brain's ability to flexibly learn, reason, remember, perceive, and act in real-world settings with minimal supervision. We review the limitations of current AI methods, define core principles of neurocognitive-inspired intelligence, and propose a modular, biologically inspired architecture that emphasizes integration, embodiment, and adaptability. We also discuss potential implementation strategies and outline various real-world applications, from robotics to education and healthcare. Importantly, this paper offers a hybrid roadmap for future research, laying the groundwork for building AI systems that more closely resemble human cognition.
Are Large Reasoning Models Interruptible?
Wu, Tsung-Han, Miroyan, Mihran, Chan, David M., Darrell, Trevor, Norouzi, Narges, Gonzalez, Joseph E.
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning but are traditionally evaluated in static, "frozen world" settings: model responses are assumed to be instantaneous, and the context of a request is presumed to be immutable over the duration of the response. While generally true for short-term tasks, the "frozen world" assumption breaks down in modern reasoning tasks such as assistive programming, where models may take hours to think through problems and code may change dramatically from the time the model starts thinking to the model's final output. In this work, we challenge the frozen world assumption and evaluate LRM robustness under two realistic dynamic scenarios: interruptions, which test the quality of the model's partial outputs on a limited budget, and dynamic context, which tests model adaptation to in-flight changes. Across mathematics and programming benchmarks that require long-form reasoning, static evaluations consistently overestimate robustness: even state-of-the-art LRMs, which achieve high accuracy in static settings, can fail unpredictably when interrupted or exposed to changing context, with performance dropping by up to 60% when updates are introduced late in the reasoning process. Our analysis further reveals several novel failure modes, including reasoning leakage, where models fold the reasoning into their final answer when interrupted; panic, where under time pressure models abandon reasoning entirely and return incorrect answers; and self-doubt, where performance degrades while incorporating updated information. Project Page: http://dynamic-lm.github.io/
ExoPredicator: Learning Abstract Models of Dynamic Worlds for Robot Planning
Liang, Yichao, Nguyen, Dat, Yang, Cambridge, Li, Tianyang, Tenenbaum, Joshua B., Rasmussen, Carl Edward, Weller, Adrian, Tavares, Zenna, Silver, Tom, Ellis, Kevin
Long-horizon embodied planning is challenging because the world does not only change through an agent's actions: exogenous processes (e.g., water heating, dominoes cascading) unfold concurrently with the agent's actions. We propose a framework for abstract world models that jointly learns (i) symbolic state representations and (ii) causal processes for both endogenous actions and exogenous mechanisms. Each causal process models the time course of a stochastic cause-effect relation. We learn these world models from limited data via variational Bayesian inference combined with LLM proposals. Across five simulated tabletop robotics environments, the learned models enable fast planning that generalizes to held-out tasks with more objects and more complex goals, outperforming a range of baselines.
From Perception to Cognition: A Survey of Vision-Language Interactive Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
Zhou, Chenyue, Wang, Mingxuan, Ma, Yanbiao, Wu, Chenxu, Chen, Wanyi, Qian, Zhe, Liu, Xinyu, Zhang, Yiwei, Wang, Junhao, Xu, Hengbo, Luo, Fei, Chen, Xiaohua, Hao, Xiaoshuai, Li, Hehan, Zhang, Andi, Wang, Wenxuan, Zhang, Kaiyan, Jia, Guoli, Li, Lingling, Lu, Zhiwu, Lu, Yang, Guo, Yike
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) strive to achieve a profound, human-like understanding of and interaction with the physical world, but often exhibit a shallow and incoherent integration when acquiring information (Perception) and conducting reasoning (Cognition). This disconnect leads to a spectrum of reasoning failures, with hallucination being the most prominent. Collectively, these issues expose a fundamental challenge: the ability to process pixels does not yet confer the ability to construct a coherent, credible internal world model. To systematically dissect and address this challenge, this survey introduces a novel and unified analytical framework: ``From Perception to Cognition." We deconstruct the complex process of vision-language interactive understanding into two interdependent layers: Perception, the foundational ability to accurately extract visual information and achieve fine-grained alignment with textual instructions; and Cognition, the higher-order capability for proactive, multi-step, goal-oriented reasoning built upon this perceptual foundation, the core of which is the formation of a dynamic observe-think-verify reasoning loop. Guided by this framework, this paper systematically analyzes the key bottlenecks of current MLLMs at both layers. It surveys the landscape of cutting-edge methods designed to address these challenges, spanning from techniques that enhance low-level visual representations to those that improve high-level reasoning paradigms. Furthermore, we review critical benchmarks and delineate future research directions. This survey aims to provide the research community with a clear, structured perspective for understanding the intrinsic limitations of current MLLMs and to illuminate the path toward building next-generation models capable of deep reasoning and a genuine understanding of the world.
WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interaction
Chi, Xiaowei, Jia, Peidong, Fan, Chun-Kai, Ju, Xiaozhu, Mi, Weishi, Zhang, Kevin, Qin, Zhiyuan, Tian, Wanxin, Ge, Kuangzhi, Li, Hao, Qian, Zezhong, Chen, Anthony, Zhou, Qiang, Jia, Yueru, Liu, Jiaming, Dai, Yong, Wuwu, Qingpo, Bai, Chengyu, Wang, Yu-Kai, Li, Ying, Chen, Lizhang, Bao, Yong, Jiang, Zhiyuan, Zhu, Jiacheng, Tang, Kai, An, Ruichuan, Luo, Yulin, Feng, Qiuxuan, Zhou, Siyuan, Chan, Chi-min, Hou, Chengkai, Xue, Wei, Han, Sirui, Guo, Yike, Zhang, Shanghang, Tang, Jian
Humans develop an understanding of intuitive physics through active interaction with the world. This approach is in stark contrast to current video models, such as Sora, which rely on passive observation and therefore struggle with grasping physical causality. This observation leads to our central hypothesis: authentic physical intuition of the world model must be grounded in extensive, causally rich interactions with the real world. To test this hypothesis, we present WoW, a 14-billion-parameter generative world model trained on 2 million robot interaction trajectories. Our findings reveal that the model's understanding of physics is a probabilistic distribution of plausible outcomes, leading to stochastic instabilities and physical hallucinations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this emergent capability can be actively constrained toward physical realism by SOPHIA, where vision-language model agents evaluate the DiT-generated output and guide its refinement by iteratively evolving the language instructions. In addition, a co-trained Inverse Dynamics Model translates these refined plans into executable robotic actions, thus closing the imagination-to-action loop. We establish WoWBench, a new benchmark focused on physical consistency and causal reasoning in video, where WoW achieves state-of-the-art performance in both human and autonomous evaluation, demonstrating strong ability in physical causality, collision dynamics, and object permanence. Our work provides systematic evidence that large-scale, real-world interaction is a cornerstone for developing physical intuition in AI. Models, data, and benchmarks will be open-sourced.
From Easy to Hard: The MIR Benchmark for Progressive Interleaved Multi-Image Reasoning
Du, Hang, Zhang, Jiayang, Nan, Guoshun, Deng, Wendi, Chen, Zhenyan, Zhang, Chenyang, Xiao, Wang, Huang, Shan, Pan, Yuqi, Qi, Tao, Leng, Sicong
Multi-image Interleaved Reasoning aims to improve Multi-modal Large Language Models' (MLLMs) ability to jointly comprehend and reason across multiple images and their associated textual contexts, introducing unique challenges beyond single-image or non-interleaved multi-image tasks. While current multi-image benchmarks overlook interleaved textual contexts and neglect distinct relationships between individual images and their associated texts, enabling models to reason over multi-image interleaved data may significantly enhance their comprehension of complex scenes and better capture cross-modal correlations. T o bridge this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark MIR, requiring joint reasoning over multiple images accompanied by interleaved textual contexts to accurately associate image regions with corresponding texts and logically connect information across images. T o enhance MLLMs' ability to comprehend multi-image interleaved data, we introduce reasoning steps for each instance within the benchmark and propose a stage-wise curriculum learning strategy. This strategy follows an "easy to hard" approach, progressively guiding models from simple to complex scenarios, thereby enhancing their ability to handle challenging tasks. Extensive experiments benchmarking multiple MLLMs demonstrate that our method significantly enhances models' reasoning performance on MIR and other established benchmarks. W e believe that MIR will encourage further research into multi-image interleaved reasoning, facilitating advancements in MLLMs' capability to handle complex inter-modal tasks.
EviNote-RAG: Enhancing RAG Models via Answer-Supportive Evidence Notes
Dai, Yuqin, Wang, Guoqing, Wang, Yuan, Dou, Kairan, Zhou, Kaichen, Zhang, Zhanwei, Yang, Shuo, Tang, Fei, Yin, Jun, Zeng, Pengyu, Ying, Zhenzhe, Yi, Can, Meng, Changhua, Zhou, Yuchen, Shen, Yongliang, Lu, Shuai
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has advanced open-domain question answering by incorporating external information into model reasoning. However, effectively leveraging external information to enhance reasoning presents the following challenges: (1) low signal-to-noise ratio, where answer-supportive external information is diluted by irrelevant material, and (2) error accumulation, which arises in multi-hop reasoning when incomplete or misleading information is incorporated. To address these challenges, we introduce EviNote-RAG, a framework that follows a retrieve-note-answer workflow. Instead of reasoning directly over raw external information, the model first produces Supportive-Evidence Notes (SENs), which concisely preserve answer-critical information and explicitly mark key and uncertainty information to improve accuracy. We further design an entailment-based Evidence Quality Reward (EQR) to ensure that SENs are logically sufficient to derive the final answer, thereby enhancing SENs' quality. Experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain QA benchmarks show that EviNote-RAG achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving answer accuracy, training stability, robustness, and efficiency. In particular, it yields relative F1 gains of 20% on HotpotQA (+0.093), 40% on Bamboogle (+0.151), and 91% on 2Wiki (+0.256), benefiting from improvements in the reasoning process.
Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners: Modular Reasoning with Brain-Like Specialization
AlKhamissi, Badr, De Sabbata, C. Nicolรฒ, Tuckute, Greta, Chen, Zeming, Schrimpf, Martin, Bosselut, Antoine
Human cognitive behavior arises from the interaction of specialized brain networks dedicated to distinct functions, such as language, logic, and social reasoning. Concretely, we partition the layers of a pretrained language model into four expert modules aligned with well-studied cognitive networks in the human brain. 's behavior can be dynamically steered at inference time by routing tokens to particular experts (e.g., favoring social over logical reasoning), enabling fine-grained control over outputs. Taken together, cognitively grounded functional specialization yields models that are both more humanlike and more human-interpretable. Neuroscience research suggests that distinct brain regions support language, reasoning, social cognition, and other cognitive functions (Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003; Kanwisher, 2010; Fedorenko et al., 2024). In contrast, the internal organization of Large Language Models (LLMs) is largely unstructured. While certain units or subnetworks show selective activation (Zhang et al., 2022; 2023; Bayazit et al., 2023; AlKhamissi et al., 2025a; Wang et al., 2025), such specialization is implicit and difficult to interpret or control. Motivated by this discrepancy, we propose a model architecture that explicitly incorporates specialization. On the machine learning (ML) side, such designs hold great potential for improving interpretability and controllability; on the cognitive science side, they provide a framework toward formulating testable computational hypotheses about how the relative contributions of different brain networks support complex behavior. The final training stage of this curriculum uses this now inductively-biased architecture to perform large-scale supervised finetuning.
Fact-R1: Towards Explainable Video Misinformation Detection with Deep Reasoning
Zhang, Fanrui, Li, Dian, Zhang, Qiang, Chen, Jun, Liu, Gang, Lin, Junxiong, Yan, Jiahong, Liu, Jiawei, Zha, Zheng-Jun
The rapid spread of multimodal misinformation on social media has raised growing concerns, while research on video misinformation detection remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, diverse datasets. Existing methods often overfit to rigid templates and lack deep reasoning over deceptive content. To address these challenges, we introduce FakeVV, a large-scale benchmark comprising over 100,000 video-text pairs with fine-grained, interpretable annotations. In addition, we further propose Fact-R1, a novel framework that integrates deep reasoning with collaborative rule-based reinforcement learning. Fact-R1 is trained through a three-stage process: (1) misinformation long-Chain-of-Thought (CoT) instruction tuning, (2) preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and (3) Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using a novel verifiable reward function. This enables Fact-R1 to exhibit emergent reasoning behaviors comparable to those observed in advanced text-based reinforcement learning systems, but in the more complex multimodal misinformation setting. Our work establishes a new paradigm for misinformation detection, bridging large-scale video understanding, reasoning-guided alignment, and interpretable verification.