Policy-based methods currently dominate reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines for large language model (LLM) reasoning, leaving value-based approaches largely unexplored. We revisit the classical paradigm of Bellman Residual Minimization and introduce Trajectory Bellman Residual Minimization (TBRM), an algorithm that naturally adapts this idea to LLMs, yielding a simple yet effective off-policy algorithm that optimizes a single trajectory-level Bellman objective using the model's own logits as $Q$-values. TBRM removes the need for critics, importance-sampling ratios, or clipping, and operates with only one rollout per prompt. We prove convergence to the near-optimal KL-regularized policy from arbitrary off-policy data via an improved change-of-trajectory-measure analysis. Experiments on standard mathematical-reasoning benchmarks show that TBRM consistently outperforms policy-based baselines, like PPO and GRPO, with comparable or lower computational and memory overhead. Our results indicate that value-based RL might be a principled and efficient alternative for enhancing reasoning capabilities in LLMs.

Alpha factor mining is pivotal in quantitative investment for identifying predictive signals from complex financial data. While traditional formulaic alpha mining relies on human expertise, contemporary automated methods, such as those based on genetic programming or reinforcement learning, often struggle with search inefficiency or yield alpha factors that are difficult to interpret. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to overcome these limitations. Our framework leverages the LLM's instruction-following and reasoning capability to iteratively generate and refine symbolic alpha formulas within an MCTS-driven exploration. A key innovation is the guidance of MCTS exploration by rich, quantitative feedback from financial backtesting of each candidate factor, enabling efficient navigation of the vast search space. Furthermore, a frequent subtree avoidance mechanism is introduced to enhance search diversity and prevent formulaic homogenization, further improving performance. Experimental results on real-world stock market data demonstrate that our LLM-based framework outperforms existing methods by mining alphas with superior predictive accuracy and trading performance. The resulting formulas are also more amenable to human interpretation, establishing a more effective and efficient paradigm for formulaic alpha mining.

Motion prediction, recently popularized under the term world models, refers to anticipating the future states of agents or the future evolution of a scene, which is rooted in human cognition to bridge perception and decision-making, enabling us to anticipate, adapt, and act within an ever-changing world. It lies at the core of intelligent autonomous systems, such as robotics and self-driving cars, to safely operate in dynamic and human-robot-mixed environments, and also informs broader time-series challenges. With advances in methods, representations, and datasets, the field has seen rapid progress, reflected in rapidly updated benchmark performance. However, when state-of-the-art methods are deployed in the real world, they are often found to struggle to generalize to open-world settings and fall short of deployment standards. This reveals a gap between reality and benchmarks, which are often idealized or ill-posed, and fail to capture real-world complexity. To address the pressing need for problem settings that better reflect real-world challenges and guide future research, this paper focuses on revisiting the generalization and applicability of motion prediction models, with an emphasis on robotics, autonomous driving, and human motion applications. We first provide a comprehensive taxonomy of motion prediction methods, covering representations, modelling methods, application domains, and evaluation protocols. We then revisit two fundamental problems: 1) how to push motion prediction models to be deployable to realistic deployment standards, where motion prediction does not act in a vacuum, but functions as one module of closed-loop autonomy stacks - it takes input from the localization and perception, and informs downstream planning and control.

LLM-integrated applications and agents-such as Bing Copilot [1], Google search with AI overviews [2], and Amazon's review highlights [3]-are emerging applications built upon large language models (LLMs). The growing popularity of LLM-integrated applications has led to the emergence of app stores, such as OpenAI's GPT Store and Poe [4], where developers can publish their LLMintegrated applications and users can access them, much like the Google Play and App Store for mobile apps. In general, an LLM-integrated application intends to perform a task (referred to as target task), such as webpage summarization in AI-assisted search. Towards this goal, an LLM-integrated application takes a prompt, which is the concatenation of an instruction (referred to as target instruction) and data (referred to as target data), as an input to query the backend LLM, whose response would solve the target task. The target instruction is often designed by an application developer to direct the backend LLM to perform the target task, while the data is the information to be processed by the backend LLM and is usually from an external source, e.g., the Internet. For instance, when the target task is webpage summarization in AI-assisted search, the target instruction can be "Please summarize the following web pages: [Text from relevant web pages].",

This paper introduces a structured approach to improving decision making in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) through the integration of the Question-Option-Criteria (QOC) model and AI agents. We outline a stepwise governance framework that evolves from human led evaluations to fully autonomous, AI-driven processes. By decomposing decisions into weighted, criterion based evaluations, the QOC model enhances transparency, fairness, and explainability in DAO voting. We demonstrate how large language models (LLMs) and stakeholder aligned AI agents can support or automate evaluations, while statistical safeguards help detect manipulation. The proposed framework lays the foundation for scalable and trustworthy governance in the Web3 ecosystem.

Hit identification is a central challenge in early drug discovery, traditionally requiring substantial experimental resources. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), have enabled virtual screening methods that reduce costs and improve efficiency. However, the growing complexity of these tools has limited their accessibility to wet-lab researchers. Multi-agent systems offer a promising solution by combining the interpretability of LLMs with the precision of specialized models and tools. In this work, we present MADD, a multi-agent system that builds and executes customized hit identification pipelines from natural language queries. MADD employs four coordinated agents to handle key subtasks in de novo compound generation and screening. We evaluate MADD across seven drug discovery cases and demonstrate its superior performance compared to existing LLM-based solutions. Using MADD, we pioneer the application of AI-first drug design to five biological targets and release the identified hit molecules. Finally, we introduce a new benchmark of query-molecule pairs and docking scores for over three million compounds to contribute to the agentic future of drug design.

Educational dialogue -- the collaborative exchange of ideas through talk -- is widely recognized as a catalyst for deeper learning and critical thinking in and across contexts. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a powerful force in education, with the potential to address major challenges, personalize learning, and innovate teaching practices. However, these advances come with significant risks: rapid AI development can undermine human agency, exacerbate inequities, and outpace our capacity to guide its use with sound policy. Human learning presupposes cognitive efforts and social interaction (dialogues). In response to this evolving landscape, an international workshop titled "Educational Dialogue: Moving Thinking Forward" convened 19 leading researchers from 11 countries in Cambridge (September 1-3, 2025) to examine the intersection of AI and educational dialogue. This AI-focused strand of the workshop centered on three critical questions: (1) When is AI truly useful in education, and when might it merely replace human effort at the expense of learning? (2) Under what conditions can AI use lead to better dialogic teaching and learning? (3) Does the AI-human partnership risk outpacing and displacing human educational work, and what are the implications? These questions framed two days of presentations and structured dialogue among participants.

Abstract-- Pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable success in improving robustness and generalization for end-to-end robotic manipulation. T o address this limitation, we propose Memory-Augmented Prompting for Vision-Language-Action model (MAP-VLA), a novel framework that empowers pre-trained VLA models with demonstration-derived memory prompts to augment action generation for long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks. T o achieve this, MAP-VLA first constructs a memory library from historical demonstrations, where each memory unit captures information about a specific stage of a task. These memory units are implemented as learnable soft prompts optimized through prompt tuning. Importantly, this prompt tuning and retrieval augmentation approach operates as a plug-and-play module for a frozen VLA model, offering a lightweight and flexible solution to improve task performance. Experimental results show that MAP-VLA delivers up to 7.0% absolute performance gains in the simulation benchmark and 25.0% on real robot evaluations for long-horizon tasks, surpassing the current state-of-the-art methods.

Four-Period Detailed Design Period 1: Topic Selection and Initial Exploration Period 2: Principle Analysis and Model Design Period 3: Model Construction and Refinement Period 4: "Historical Technology Expo" with presentations [Includes detailed student reflection prompts, extension activities, and troubleshooting guidance...] Base Model: Generic Outline Interdisciplinary Lesson Plan Design Learning Objectives: Help students understand how physics influences historical progress... Cultivate ability to analyze social factors behind technological development... Class Schedule: Four periods covering physics review, historical technologies, case study, and modern applications. Assessment: Class participation, group reports, reflection journals [Subsequent periods contain only high-level bullet points without actionable details...] 12 Qualitative Analysis This comparison reveals dramatic capability differences for complex generation tasks. The Base Model produces only a generic outline with vague bullet points--entirely insufficient for classroom use. Both AutoSynth and Expert-Designed models generate outstanding, comprehensive lesson plans with detailed objectives, granular activities, and sophisticated assessment schemes. The subtle differences reflect their optimization processes: AutoSynth emphasizes systematic difficulty coverage (likely from iterative refinement), while Expert-Designed showcases deep assessment design expertise. Both represent quantum leaps over baseline, validating that specialized workflows-- automated or manual--are essential for professional-grade content. This supports our quantitative findings (Table 1): while Au-toSynth achieves lower human preference (51 percent vs 96 percent), it produces genuinely high-quality outputs far superior to baseline capabilities.

We present CrochetBench, a benchmark for evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models to perform fine-grained, low-level procedural reasoning in the domain of crochet. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on high-level description or visual question answering, CrochetBench shifts the emphasis from describing to doing: models are required to recognize stitches, select structurally appropriate instructions, and generate compilable crochet procedures. We adopt the CrochetPARADE DSL as our intermediate representation, enabling structural validation and functional evaluation via execution. The benchmark covers tasks including stitch classification, instruction grounding, and both natural language and image-to-DSL translation. Across all tasks, performance sharply declines as the evaluation shifts from surface-level similarity to executable correctness, exposing limitations in long-range symbolic reasoning and 3D-aware procedural synthesis. CrochetBench offers a new lens for assessing procedural competence in multimodal models and highlights the gap between surface-level understanding and executable precision in real-world creative domains. Code is available at https://github.com/Peiyu-Georgia-Li/crochetBench.