Black-box optimization (BBO) addresses problems where objectives are accessible only through costly queries without gradients or explicit structure. Classical derivative-free methods -- line search, direct search, and model-based solvers such as Bayesian optimization -- form the backbone of BBO, yet often struggle in high-dimensional, noisy, or mixed-integer settings. Recent advances use machine learning (ML) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance BBO: ML provides expressive surrogates, adaptive updates, meta-learning portfolios, and generative models, while RL enables dynamic operator configuration, robustness, and meta-optimization across tasks. This paper surveys these developments, covering representative algorithms such as NNs with the modular model-based optimization framework (mlrMBO), zeroth-order adaptive momentum methods (ZO-AdaMM), automated BBO (ABBO), distributed block-wise optimization (DiBB), partition-based Bayesian optimization (SPBOpt), the transformer-based optimizer (B2Opt), diffusion-model-based BBO, surrogate-assisted RL for differential evolution (Surr-RLDE), robust BBO (RBO), coordinate-ascent model-based optimization with relative entropy (CAS-MORE), log-barrier stochastic gradient descent (LB-SGD), policy improvement with black-box (PIBB), and offline Q-learning with Mamba backbones (Q-Mamba). We also review benchmark efforts such as the NeurIPS 2020 BBO Challenge and the MetaBox framework. Overall, we highlight how ML and RL transform classical inexact solvers into more scalable, robust, and adaptive frameworks for real-world optimization.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich temporal dynamics that conventional encoding approaches fail to adequately capture. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for EHR modeling, they struggle to reason about sequential clinical events and temporal dependencies. We propose Next Event Prediction (NEP), a framework that enhances LLMs' temporal reasoning through autoregressive fine-tuning on clinical event sequences. By reformulating EHRs as timestamped event chains and predicting future medical events, NEP explicitly models disease progression patterns and causal relationships. Extensive evaluations across oncology survival prediction and clinical diagnosis tasks demonstrate NEP's superiority, outperforming specialized EHR models by 4.6% AUROC and general-purpose LLMs by 7.2% C-index in temporal reasoning tasks. Our analyses reveal dual benefits: state-of-the-art prediction accuracy combined with clinically interpretable attention patterns that align with known disease pathways.

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve incredible performance across a wide range of tasks, but their large size makes inference costly. Recent work shows that selectively skipping VLM layers can improve efficiency with minimal performance loss or even performance improvements. However, this technique remains underused due to the limited understanding of when layer skipping is beneficial. In this paper, we develop a framework that uses information and learning theory to characterize the conditions under which layer skipping enhances efficiency without sacrificing performance. Motivated by these observations, we analyze the evolution of the VLM's hidden representations through the LLM backbone and show that layers with large redundancy as predicted by our framework coincide with those skipped by popular layer-skipping methods in practice, providing a unified theoretical scaffolding for multiple efficient inference techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that skipping such layers yields faster inference that preserves performance, and also show that applying skipping outside these conditions leads to model degradation.

Vision Graph Neural Networks (ViGs) have demonstrated promising performance in image recognition tasks against Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). An essential part of the ViG framework is the node-neighbor feature aggregation method. Although various graph convolution methods, such as Max-Relative, EdgeConv, GIN, and GraphSAGE, have been explored, a versatile aggregation method that effectively captures complex node-neighbor relationships without requiring architecture-specific refinements is needed. T o address this gap, we propose a cross-attention-based aggregation method in which the query projections come from the node, while the key projections come from its neighbors. Additionally, we introduce a novel architecture called AttentionViG that uses the proposed cross-attention aggregation scheme to conduct non-local message passing. W e evaluated the image recognition performance of AttentionViG on the ImageNet-1K benchmark, where it achieved SOTA performance. Additionally, we assessed its transferability to downstream tasks, including object detection and instance segmentation on MS COCO 2017, as well as semantic segmentation on ADE20K. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method not only achieves strong performance, but also maintains efficiency, delivering competitive accuracy with comparable FLOPs to prior vision GNN architectures.

Vision-language models are increasingly used to generate image captions in specific styles, such as humor or romantic. However, these transformer-based models often struggle with this subjective task in a zero-shot setting. While preference data can be used to align them toward a desired style, such data is expensive to acquire, limiting the ability to explore the models' full capabilities. This work addresses this by studying the data efficiency of aligning small vision-language models to humor and romantic styles. This approach helps to define the performance limits of these models and determine how little preference data is needed to achieve stylistic saturation, benchmarking their capabilities and limitations.

Generalist multimodal AI systems such as large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly accessed by clinicians and patients alike for medical image interpretation through widely available consumer-facing chatbots. Most evaluations claiming expert level performance are on public datasets containing common pathologies. Rigorous evaluation of frontier models on difficult diagnostic cases remains limited. We developed a pilot benchmark of 50 expert-level "spot diagnosis" cases across multiple imaging modalities to evaluate the performance of frontier AI models against board-certified radiologists and radiology trainees. To mirror real-world usage, the reasoning modes of five popular frontier AI models were tested through their native web interfaces, viz. OpenAI o3, OpenAI GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok-4, and Claude Opus 4.1. Accuracy was scored by blinded experts, and reproducibility was assessed across three independent runs. GPT-5 was additionally evaluated across various reasoning modes. Reasoning quality errors were assessed and a taxonomy of visual reasoning errors was defined. Board-certified radiologists achieved the highest diagnostic accuracy (83%), outperforming trainees (45%) and all AI models (best performance shown by GPT-5: 30%). Reliability was substantial for GPT-5 and o3, moderate for Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok-4, and poor for Claude Opus 4.1. These findings demonstrate that advanced frontier models fall far short of radiologists in challenging diagnostic cases. Our benchmark highlights the present limitations of generalist AI in medical imaging and cautions against unsupervised clinical use. We also provide a qualitative analysis of reasoning traces and propose a practical taxonomy of visual reasoning errors by AI models for better understanding their failure modes, informing evaluation standards and guiding more robust model development.

While reinforcement learning has advanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), these gains are largely confined to English, creating a significant performance disparity across languages. To address this, we introduce Pivot-Based Reinforcement Learning with Semantically V erifiable Rewards (PB-RLSVR), a novel framework that enhances multilingual reasoning by circumventing the need for human-annotated data in target languages. Our approach employs a high-performing English LLM as a "pivot" model to generate reference responses for reasoning tasks. A multilingual model is then rewarded based on the semantic equivalence of its responses to the English reference, effectively transferring the pivot model's reasoning capabilities across languages. We investigate several cross-lingual semantic reward functions, including those based on embeddings and machine translation. Extensive experiments on a suite of multilingual reasoning benchmarks show that our method significantly narrows the performance gap between English and other languages, substantially outperforming traditional PPO baselines. Specifically, our PB-RLSVR framework improves the average multilingual performance of Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen3-32B by 16.41% and 10.17%, respectively, demonstrating a powerful and data-efficient approach to building truly multilingual reasoning agents. The reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced dramatically, driven by sophisticated training paradigms such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (Ouyang et al., 2022) and innovations in policy optimization algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) (Schulman et al., 2017a) such as REINFORCE++ (Hu et al., 2025) and Group Regularized Policy Optimization (GRPO) (Shao et al., 2024).

Although reinforcement learning (RL) can effectively enhance the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), current methods remain heavily dependent on labor-intensive datasets that require extensive manual construction and verification, leading to extremely high training costs and consequently constraining the practical deployment of VLMs. To address this challenge, we propose Vision-Zero, a domain-agnostic framework enabling VLM self-improvement through competitive visual games generated from arbitrary image pairs. Specifically, Vision-Zero encompasses three main attributes: (1) Strategic Self-Play Framework: Vision-Zero trains VLMs in "Who Is the Spy"-style games, where the models engage in strategic reasoning and actions across multiple roles. Through interactive gameplay, models autonomously generate their training data without human annotation. (2) Gameplay from Arbitrary Images: Unlike existing gamified frameworks, Vision-Zero can generate games from arbitrary images, thereby enhancing the model's reasoning ability across diverse domains and showing strong generalization to different tasks. We demonstrate this versatility using three distinct types of image datasets: CLEVR-based synthetic scenes, charts, and real-world images. (3) Sustainable Performance Gain: We introduce Iterative Self-Play Policy Optimization (Iterative-SPO), a novel training algorithm that alternates between Self-Play and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), mitigating the performance plateau often seen in self-play-only training and achieving sustained long-term improvements. Despite using label-free data, Vision-Zero achieves state-of-the-art performance on reasoning, chart question answering, and vision-centric understanding tasks, surpassing other annotation-based methods. Models and code has been released at https://github.com/wangqinsi1/Vision-Zero.

The evolution of digital communication systems and the designs of online platforms have inadvertently facilitated the subconscious propagation of toxic behavior. Giving rise to reactive responses to toxic behavior. Toxicity in online content and Artificial Intelligence Systems has become a serious challenge to individual and collective well-being around the world. It is more detrimental to society than we realize. Toxicity, expressed in language, image, and video, can be interpreted in various ways depending on the context of usage. Therefore, a comprehensive taxonomy is crucial to detect and mitigate toxicity in online content, Artificial Intelligence systems, and/or Large Language Models in a proactive manner. A comprehensive understanding of toxicity is likely to facilitate the design of practical solutions for toxicity detection and mitigation. The classification in published literature has focused on only a limited number of aspects of this very complex issue, with a pattern of reactive strategies in response to toxicity. This survey attempts to generate a comprehensive taxonomy of toxicity from various perspectives. It presents a holistic approach to explain the toxicity by understanding the context and environment that society is facing in the Artificial Intelligence era. This survey summarizes the toxicity-related datasets and research on toxicity detection and mitigation for Large Language Models, social media platforms, and other online platforms, detailing their attributes in textual mode, focused on the English language. Finally, we suggest the research gaps in toxicity mitigation based on datasets, mitigation strategies, Large Language Models, adaptability, explainability, and evaluation.

Open-ended evaluation is essential for deploying large language models in real-world settings. In studying HealthBench, we observe that using the model itself as a grader and generating rubric-based reward signals substantially improves reasoning performance. Remarkably, the trained model also becomes a stronger grader. Motivated by this, we introduce Self-Rewarding Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning for Open-Ended Reasoning, a lightweight framework that enables faster and more resource-efficient training while surpassing baselines. Remarkably, on Qwen3-32B, training with just the 4000-sample HealthBench Easy subset is sufficient to obtain a model that exceeds GPT-5 on HealthBench Hard. Incorporating a small amount of teacher-graded data further enhances performance for less capable models.