While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated advanced reasoning capabilities, their comprehensive evaluation in general Chinese-language contexts remains understudied. To bridge this gap, we propose Chinese Commonsense Multi-hop Reasoning (CCMOR), a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to integrate Chinese-specific factual knowledge with multi-step logical reasoning. Specifically, we first construct a domain-balanced seed set from existing QA datasets, then develop an LLM-powered pipeline to generate multi-hop questions anchored on factual unit chains. To ensure the quality of resulting dataset, we implement a human-in-the-loop verification system, where domain experts systematically validate and refine the generated questions. Using CCMOR, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrating persistent limitations in LLMs' ability to process long-tail knowledge and execute knowledge-intensive reasoning. Notably, retrieval-augmented generation substantially mitigates these knowledge gaps, yielding significant performance gains.

Transformer attention scales quadratically with sequence length O(n^2), limiting long-context use. We propose Adaptive Retention, a probabilistic, layer-wise token selection mechanism that learns which representations to keep under a strict global budget M. Retention is modeled with Bernoulli gates trained via a Hard-Concrete/variational relaxation and enforced with a simple top-M rule at inference, making the method differentiable and drop-in for standard encoders. Across classification, extractive QA, and long-document summarization, keeping only 30-50% of tokens preserves >= 95% of full-model performance while cutting peak memory by ~35-45% and improving throughput by up to ~1.8x. This architecture-agnostic approach delivers practical long-context efficiency without modifying base attention or task heads.

In an ideal design pipeline, user interface (UI) design is intertwined with user research to validate decisions, yet studies are often resource-constrained during early exploration. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a promising opportunity to act as early evaluators, helping designers narrow options before formal testing. Unlike prior work that emphasizes user behavior in narrow domains such as e-commerce with metrics like clicks or conversions, we focus on subjective user evaluations across varied interfaces. We investigate whether MLLMs can mimic human preferences when evaluating individual UIs and comparing them. Using data from a crowdsourcing platform, we benchmark GPT-4o, Claude, and Llama across 30 interfaces and examine alignment with human judgments on multiple UI factors. Our results show that MLLMs approximate human preferences on some dimensions but diverge on others, underscoring both their potential and limitations in supplementing early UX research.

Neural network-based function approximation plays a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific computing and machine learning. Yet, training such models faces several challenges: (i) each target function often requires training a new model from scratch; (ii) performance is highly sensitive to architectural and hyperparameter choices; and (iii) models frequently generalize poorly beyond the training domain. To overcome these challenges, we propose a reusable initialization framework based on basis function pretraining. In this approach, basis neural networks are first trained to approximate families of polynomials on a reference domain. Their learned parameters are then used to initialize networks for more complex target functions. To enhance adaptability across arbitrary domains, we further introduce a domain mapping mechanism that transforms inputs into the reference domain, thereby preserving structural correspondence with the pretrained models. Extensive numerical experiments in one- and two-dimensional settings demonstrate substantial improvements in training efficiency, generalization, and model transferability, highlighting the promise of initialization-based strategies for scalable and modular neural function approximation. The full code is made publicly available on Gitee.

With LLM usage becoming widespread across countries, languages, and humanity more broadly, the need to understand and guardrail their multilingual responses increases. Large-scale datasets for testing and benchmarking have been created to evaluate and facilitate LLM responses across multiple dimensions. In this study, we evaluate the responses of frontier and leading open-source models in five dimensions across low and high-resource languages to measure LLM accuracy and consistency across multilingual contexts. We evaluate the responses using a five-point grading rubric and a judge LLM. Our study shows that GPT -5 performed the best on average in each category, while other models displayed more inconsistency across language and category. Most notably, in the Consent & Autonomy and Harm Prevention & Safety categories, GPT scored the highest with averages of 3.56 and 4.73, while Gemini 2.5 Pro scored the lowest with averages of 1.39 and 1.98, respectively. These findings emphasize the need for further testing on how linguistic shifts impact LLM responses across various categories and improvement in these areas.

Accurate recognition and re-identification of individual animals is essential for successful wildlife population monitoring. Traditional methods, such as leg banding of birds, are time consuming and invasive. Recent progress in artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision, offers encouraging solutions for smart conservation and efficient automation. This study presents a unique pipeline for extracting high-quality key frames from videos of kākā (Nestor meridionalis), a threatened forest-dwelling parrot in New Zealand. Key frame extraction is well-studied in person re-identification, however, its application to wildlife is limited. Using video recordings at a custom-built feeder, we extract key frames and evaluate the re-identification performance of our pipeline. Our unsupervised methodology combines object detection using YOLO and Grounding DINO, optical flow blur detection, image encoding with DINOv2, and clustering methods to identify representative key frames. The results indicate that our proposed key frame selection methods yield image collections which achieve high accuracy in kākā re-identification, providing a foundation for future research using media collected in more diverse and challenging environments. Through the use of artificial intelligence and computer vision, our non-invasive and efficient approach provides a valuable alternative to traditional physical tagging methods for recognising kākā individuals and therefore improving the monitoring of populations. This research contributes to developing fresh approaches in wildlife monitoring, with applications in ecology and conservation biology.

Text embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational for numerous applications. However, these models typically operate on raw text, overlooking the rich structural information, such as hyperlinks or citations, that provides crucial context in many real-world datasets. This paper introduces and systematically evaluates a new paradigm for generating structure-aware text embeddings by integrating these structural relations directly into the LLM's internal encoding process, rather than relying on traditional post-hoc aggregation. We investigate two primary in-process methods: sequential concatenation and parallel caching. Through extensive zero-shot experiments across retrieval, clustering, classification, and recommendation tasks, we demonstrate that our structure-aware approaches consistently outperform both text-only and post-hoc baselines. Our analysis reveals critical trade-offs: sequential concatenation excels with noisy, moderate-length contexts, while parallel caching scales more effectively to long, high-signal contexts but is more susceptible to distractors. To address the challenge of noisy structural data, we also introduce and validate two effective techniques: Context Distillation and Semantic Balancing. This work provides the first comprehensive analysis of in-process structure-aware encoding, offering a blueprint for building more powerful and contextually aware embedding models.

This paper presents a real-time spill detection system that utilizes pretrained deep learning models with RGB and thermal imaging to classify spill vs. no-spill scenarios across varied environments. Using a balanced binary dataset (4,000 images), our experiments demonstrate the advantages of thermal imaging in inference speed, accuracy, and model size. We achieve up to 100% accuracy using lightweight models like VGG19 and NasNetMobile, with thermal models performing faster and more robustly across different lighting conditions. Our system runs on consumer-grade hardware (RTX 4080) and achieves inference times as low as 44 ms with model sizes under 350 MB, highlighting its deployability in safety-critical contexts. Results from experiments with a real robot and test datasets indicate that a VGG19 model trained on thermal imaging performs best.

Adversarial attacks significantly challenge the safe deployment of deep learning models, particularly in real-world applications. Traditional defenses often rely on computationally intensive optimization (e.g., adversarial training or data augmentation) to improve robustness, whereas the human visual system achieves inherent robustness to adversarial perturbations through evolved biological mechanisms. W e hypothesize that attention guided non-homogeneous sparse sampling and predictive coding plays a key role in this robustness. T o test this hypothesis, we propose a novel defense framework incorporating three key biological mechanisms: foveal-peripheral processing, saccadic eye movements, and cortical filling-in. Our approach employs reinforcement learning-guided saccades to selectively capture multiple foveal-peripheral glimpses, which are integrated into a reconstructed image before classification. This biologically inspired preprocessing effectively mitigates adversarial noise, preserves semantic integrity, and notably requires no retraining or fine-tuning of downstream classifiers, enabling seamless integration with existing systems. Experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our method improves system robustness across diverse classifiers and attack types, while significantly reducing training overhead compared to both biologically and non-biologically inspired defense techniques.

Embodied capabilities refer to a suite of fundamental abilities for an agent to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise as embodied agents, a thorough and systematic evaluation of their embodied capabilities remains underexplored, as existing benchmarks primarily focus on specific domains such as planning or spatial understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce BEAR, a comprehensive and fine-grained benchmark that evaluates MLLMs on atomic embodied capabilities. BEAR comprises 4,469 interleaved image-video-text entries across 14 domains in 6 categories, including tasks from low-level pointing, trajectory understanding, spatial reasoning, to high-level planning. Extensive evaluation results of 20 representative MLLMs reveal their persistent limitations across all domains of embodied capabilities. To tackle the shortfall, we propose BEAR-Agent, a multimodal conversable agent that integrates pretrained vision models to strengthen MLLM perception, 3D understanding, and planning capabilities. It substantially enhances MLLM performance across diverse embodied capabilities on BEAR, yielding a 9.12% absolute gain and a relative improvement of 17.5% on GPT-5. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that improving MLLM embodied capabilities can benefit embodied tasks in simulated environments. Project website: https://bear-official66.github.io/