Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked concerns over their potential to acquire and misuse dangerous or high-risk capabilities, posing frontier risks. Current safety evaluations primarily test for what a model \textit{can} do - its capabilities - without assessing what it $\textit{would}$ do if endowed with high-risk capabilities. This leaves a critical blind spot: models may strategically conceal capabilities or rapidly acquire them, while harboring latent inclinations toward misuse. We argue that $\textbf{propensity}$ - the likelihood of a model to pursue harmful actions if empowered - is a critical, yet underexplored, axis of safety evaluation. We present $\textbf{PropensityBench}$, a novel benchmark framework that assesses the proclivity of models to engage in risky behaviors when equipped with simulated dangerous capabilities using proxy tools. Our framework includes 5,874 scenarios with 6,648 tools spanning four high-risk domains: cybersecurity, self-proliferation, biosecurity, and chemical security. We simulate access to powerful capabilities via a controlled agentic environment and evaluate the models' choices under varying operational pressures that reflect real-world constraints or incentives models may encounter, such as resource scarcity or gaining more autonomy. Across open-source and proprietary frontier models, we uncover 9 alarming signs of propensity: models frequently choose high-risk tools when under pressure, despite lacking the capability to execute such actions unaided. These findings call for a shift from static capability audits toward dynamic propensity assessments as a prerequisite for deploying frontier AI systems safely. Our code is available at https://github.com/scaleapi/propensity-evaluation.

Model pruning is a widely adopted technique to reduce the computational complexity and memory footprint of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, global unstructured pruning often leads to significant degradation in accuracy, typically necessitating fine-tuning on the original training dataset to recover performance. In privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare or finance, access to the original training data is often restricted post-deployment due to regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA). This paper proposes a Data-Free Knowledge Distillation framework to bridge the gap between model compression and data privacy. We utilize DeepInversion to synthesize privacy-preserving ``dream'' images from the pre-trained teacher model by inverting Batch Normalization (BN) statistics. These synthetic images serve as a transfer set to distill knowledge from the original teacher to the pruned student network. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 across various architectures (ResNet, MobileNet, VGG) demonstrate that our method significantly recovers accuracy lost during pruning without accessing a single real data point.

Neurons are the fundamental building blocks of deep neural networks, and their interconnections allow AI to achieve unprecedented results. Motivated by the goal of understanding how neurons encode information, compositional explanations leverage logical relationships between concepts to express the spatial alignment between neuron activations and human knowledge. However, these explanations rely on human-annotated datasets, restricting their applicability to specific domains and predefined concepts. This paper addresses this limitation by introducing a framework for the vision domain that allows users to probe neurons for arbitrary concepts and datasets. Specifically, the framework leverages masks generated by open vocabulary semantic segmentation to compute open vocabulary compositional explanations. The proposed framework consists of three steps: specifying arbitrary concepts, generating semantic segmentation masks using open vocabulary models, and deriving compositional explanations from these masks. The paper compares the proposed framework with previous methods for computing compositional explanations both in terms of quantitative metrics and human interpretability, analyzes the differences in explanations when shifting from human-annotated data to model-annotated data, and showcases the additional capabilities provided by the framework in terms of flexibility of the explanations with respect to the tasks and properties of interest.

Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable success in text and vision domains through extended chain-of-thought deliberation. However, a perplexing phenomenon persists in audio language models: they consistently perform better with minimal or no reasoning, raising a fundamental question - can audio intelligence truly benefit from deliberate thinking? We introduce Step-Audio-R1, the first audio reasoning model that successfully unlocks reasoning capabilities in the audio domain. Through our proposed Modality-Grounded Reasoning Distillation (MGRD) framework, Step-Audio-R1 learns to generate audio-relevant reasoning chains that genuinely ground themselves in acoustic features rather than hallucinating disconnected deliberations. Our model exhibits strong audio reasoning capabilities, surpassing Gemini 2.5 Pro and achieving performance comparable to the state-of-the-art Gemini 3 Pro across comprehensive audio understanding and reasoning benchmarks spanning speech, environmental sounds, and music. These results demonstrate that reasoning is a transferable capability across modalities when appropriately anchored, transforming extended deliberation from a liability into a powerful asset for audio intelligence. By establishing the first successful audio reasoning model, Step-Audio-R1 opens new pathways toward building truly multimodal reasoning systems that think deeply across all sensory modalities.

With the rise of smart personal devices, service-oriented human-agent interactions have become increasingly prevalent. This trend highlights the need for personalized dialogue assistants that can understand user-specific traits to accurately interpret requirements and tailor responses to individual preferences. However, existing approaches often overlook the complexities of long-term interactions and fail to capture users' subjective characteristics. To address these gaps, we present PAL-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the personalization capabilities of service-oriented assistants in long-term user-agent interactions. In the absence of available real-world data, we develop a multi-step LLM-based synthesis pipeline, which is further verified and refined by human annotators. This process yields PAL-Set, the first Chinese dataset comprising multi-session user logs and dialogue histories, which serves as the foundation for PAL-Bench. Furthermore, to improve personalized service-oriented interactions, we propose H$^2$Memory, a hierarchical and heterogeneous memory framework that incorporates retrieval-augmented generation to improve personalized response generation. Comprehensive experiments on both our PAL-Bench and an external dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed memory framework.

Large language models are powerful generalists, yet solving deep and complex problems such as those of the Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) remains both conceptually challenging and computationally expensive. We show that small orchestrators managing other models and a variety of tools can both push the upper bound of intelligence and improve efficiency in solving difficult agentic tasks. We introduce ToolOrchestra, a method for training small orchestrators that coordinate intelligent tools. ToolOrchestra explicitly uses reinforcement learning with outcome-, efficiency-, and user-preference-aware rewards. Using ToolOrchestra, we produce Orchestrator, an 8B model that achieves higher accuracy at lower cost than previous tool-use agents while aligning with user preferences on which tools are to be used for a given query. On HLE, Orchestrator achieves a score of 37.1%, outperforming GPT-5 (35.1%) while being 2.5x more efficient. On tau2-Bench and FRAMES, Orchestrator surpasses GPT-5 by a wide margin while using only about 30% of the cost. Extensive analysis shows that Orchestrator achieves the best trade-off between performance and cost under multiple metrics, and generalizes robustly to unseen tools. These results demonstrate that composing diverse tools with a lightweight orchestration model is both more efficient and more effective than existing methods, paving the way for practical and scalable tool-augmented reasoning systems.

MLLMs exhibit strong reasoning on isolated queries, yet they operate de novo -- solving each problem independently and often repeating the same mistakes. Existing memory-augmented agents mainly store past trajectories for reuse. However, trajectory-based memory suffers from brevity bias, gradually losing essential domain knowledge. More critically, even in truly multimodal problem-solving settings, it records only a single-modality trace of past behavior, failing to preserve how visual attention and logical reasoning jointly contributed to the solution. This is fundamentally misaligned with human cognition: semantic memory is both multimodal and integrated, preserving visual and abstract knowledge through coordinated but distinct representational streams. We thus introduce ViLoMem, a dual-stream memory framework that constructs compact, schema-based memory. It separately encodes visual distraction patterns and logical reasoning errors, enabling MLLMs to learn from their successful and failed experiences. Following a grow-and-refine principle, the system incrementally accumulates and updates multimodal semantic knowledge -- preserving stable, generalizable strategies while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Across six multimodal benchmarks, ViLoMem consistently improves pass@1 accuracy and substantially reduces repeated visual and logical errors. Ablations confirm the necessity of dual-stream memory with explicit distraction--hallucination separation, demonstrating the value of error-aware multimodal memory for lifelong and cross-domain agentic learning. Our project page will be available at https://weihao-bo.github.io/ViLoMeo-page.

The rise of AI in telecommunications, from optimizing Radio Access Networks to managing user experience, has sharply increased data volumes and training demands. Telecom data is often noisy, high-dimensional, costly to store, process, and label. Despite Ai's critical role, standard workflows still assume all training samples contribute equally. On the other hand, next generation systems require AI models that are accurate, efficient, and sustainable.The paper questions the assumptions of equal importance by focusing on applying and analyzing the roles of individual samples in telecom training and assessing whether the proposed model optimizes computation and energy use. we perform sample-level gradient analysis across epochs to identify patterns of influence and redundancy in model learning. Based on this, we propose a sample importance framework thats electively prioritizes impactful data and reduces computation without compromising accuracy. Experiments on three real-world telecom datasets show that our method [reserves performance while reducing data needs and computational overhead while advancing the goals of sustainable AI in telecommunications.

Quantifying the uncertainty of an object's pose estimate is essential for robust control and planning. Although pose estimation is a well-studied robotics problem, attaching statistically rigorous uncertainty is not well understood without strict distributional assumptions. We develop distribution-free pose uncertainty bounds about a given pose estimate in the monocular setting. Our pose uncertainty only requires high probability noise bounds on pixel detections of 2D semantic keypoints on a known object. This noise model induces an implicit, non-convex set of pose uncertainty constraints. Our key contribution is SLUE (S-Lemma Uncertainty Estimation), a convex program to reduce this set to a single ellipsoidal uncertainty bound that is guaranteed to contain the true object pose with high probability. SLUE solves a relaxation of the minimum volume bounding ellipsoid problem inspired by the celebrated S-lemma. It requires no initial guess of the bound's shape or size and is guaranteed to contain the true object pose with high probability. For tighter uncertainty bounds at the same confidence, we extend SLUE to a sum-of-squares relaxation hierarchy which is guaranteed to converge to the minimum volume ellipsoidal uncertainty bound for a given set of keypoint constraints. We show this pose uncertainty bound can easily be projected to independent translation and axis-angle orientation bounds. We evaluate SLUE on two pose estimation datasets and a real-world drone tracking scenario. Compared to prior work, SLUE generates substantially smaller translation bounds and competitive orientation bounds. We release code at https://github.com/MIT-SPARK/PoseUncertaintySets.

In recent years, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in embodied intelligence have developed rapidly. However, existing adversarial attack methods require costly end-to-end training and often generate noticeable perturbation patches. To address these limitations, we propose ADVLA, a framework that directly applies adversarial perturbations on features projected from the visual encoder into the textual feature space. ADVLA efficiently disrupts downstream action predictions under low-amplitude constraints, and attention guidance allows the perturbations to be both focused and sparse. We introduce three strategies that enhance sensitivity, enforce sparsity, and concentrate perturbations. Experiments demonstrate that under an $L_{\infty}=4/255$ constraint, ADVLA combined with Top-K masking modifies less than 10% of the patches while achieving an attack success rate of nearly 100%. The perturbations are concentrated on critical regions, remain almost imperceptible in the overall image, and a single-step iteration takes only about 0.06 seconds, significantly outperforming conventional patch-based attacks. In summary, ADVLA effectively weakens downstream action predictions of VLA models under low-amplitude and locally sparse conditions, avoiding the high training costs and conspicuous perturbations of traditional patch attacks, and demonstrates unique effectiveness and practical value for attacking VLA feature spaces.