Data visualizations are vital components of many scientific articles and news stories. Current vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle on basic data visualization understanding tasks, but the causes of failure remain unclear. Are VLM failures attributable to limitations in how visual information in the data visualization is encoded, how information is transferred between the vision and language modules, or how information is processed within the language module? We developed FUGU, a suite of data visualization understanding tasks, to precisely characterize potential sources of difficulty (e.g., extracting the position of data points, distances between them, and other summary statistics). We used FUGU to investigate three widely used VLMs. To diagnose the sources of errors produced by these models, we used activation patching and linear probes to trace information flow through models across a variety of prompting strategies. We found that some models fail to generate the coordinates of individual data points correctly, and these initial errors often lead to erroneous final responses. When these models are provided with the correct coordinates, performance improves substantially. Moreover, even when the model generates an incorrect response, the correct coordinates can be successfully read out from the latent representations in the vision encoder, suggesting that the source of these errors lies in the vision-language handoff. We further found that while providing correct coordinates helps with tasks involving one or a small number of data points, it generally worsens performance for tasks that require extracting statistical relationships across many data points. Fine-tuning models on FUGU also fails to yield ceiling performance. These findings point to architectural constraints in current VLMs that might pose significant challenges for reliable data visualization understanding.

Reasoning over long contexts is essential for large language models. While reinforcement learning (RL) enhances short-context reasoning by inducing "Aha" moments in chain-of-thought, the advanced thinking patterns required for long-context reasoning remain largely unexplored, and high-difficulty RL data are scarce. In this paper, we introduce LoongRL, a data-driven RL method for advanced long-context reasoning. Central to LoongRL is KeyChain, a synthesis approach that transforms short multi-hop QA into high-difficulty long-context tasks by inserting UUID chains that hide the true question among large collections of distracting documents. Solving these tasks requires the model to trace the correct chain step-by-step, identify the true question, retrieve relevant facts and reason over them to answer correctly. RL training on KeyChain data induces an emergent plan-retrieve-reason-recheck reasoning pattern that generalizes far beyond training length. Models trained at 16K effectively solve 128K tasks without prohibitive full-length RL rollout costs. On Qwen2.5-7B and 14B, LoongRL substantially improves long-context multi-hop QA accuracy by +23.5% and +21.1% absolute gains. The resulting LoongRL-14B reaches a score of 74.2, rivaling much larger frontier models such as o3-mini (74.5) and DeepSeek-R1 (74.9). It also improves long-context retrieval, passes all 128K needle-in-a-haystack stress tests, and preserves short-context reasoning capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) and agent techniques have brought a fundamental shift in the functionality and development paradigm of data analysis tasks (a.k.a LLM/Agent-as-Data-Analyst), demonstrating substantial impact across both academia and industry. In comparison with traditional rule or small-model based approaches, (agentic) LLMs enable complex data understanding, natural language interfaces, semantic analysis functions, and autonomous pipeline orchestration. From a modality perspective, we review LLM-based techniques for (i) structured data (e.g., NL2SQL, NL2GQL, ModelQA), (ii) semi-structured data (e.g., markup languages understanding, semi-structured table question answering), (iii) unstructured data (e.g., chart understanding, text/image document understanding), and (iv) heterogeneous data (e.g., data retrieval and modality alignment in data lakes). The technical evolution further distills four key design goals for intelligent data analysis agents, namely semantic-aware design, autonomous pipelines, tool-augmented workflows, and support for open-world tasks. Finally, we outline the remaining challenges and propose several insights and practical directions for advancing LLM/Agent-powered data analysis.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have enabled training-free regional image editing by leveraging the generative priors of foundation models. However, existing methods struggle to balance text adherence in edited regions, context fidelity in unedited areas, and seamless integration of edits. We introduce CannyEdit, a novel training-free framework that addresses this trilemma through two key innovations. First, Selective Canny Control applies structural guidance from a Canny ControlNet only to the unedited regions, preserving the original image's details while allowing for precise, text-driven changes in the specified editable area. Second, Dual-Prompt Guidance utilizes both a local prompt for the specific edit and a global prompt for overall scene coherence. Through this synergistic approach, these components enable controllable local editing for object addition, replacement, and removal, achieving a superior trade-off among text adherence, context fidelity, and editing seamlessness compared to current region-based methods. Beyond this, CannyEdit offers exceptional flexibility: it operates effectively with rough masks or even single-point hints in addition tasks. Furthermore, the framework can seamlessly integrate with vision-language models in a training-free manner for complex instruction-based editing that requires planning and reasoning. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate CannyEdit's strong performance against leading instruction-based editors in complex object addition scenarios.

Deriving operational intelligence from organizational data repositories is a key challenge due to the dichotomy of data confidentiality vs data integration objectives, as well as the limitations of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools relative to the specific knowledge structure of domains such as operations and maintenance. In this work, we discuss Knowledge Graph construction and break down the Knowledge Extraction process into its Named Entity Recognition, Coreference Resolution, Named Entity Linking, and Relation Extraction functional components. We then evaluate sixteen NLP tools in concert with or in comparison to the rapidly advancing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We focus on the operational and maintenance intelligence use case for trusted applications in the aircraft industry. A baseline dataset is derived from a rich public domain US Federal Aviation Administration dataset focused on equipment failures or maintenance requirements. We assess the zero-shot performance of NLP and LLM tools that can be operated within a controlled, confidential environment (no data is sent to third parties). Based on our observation of significant performance limitations, we discuss the challenges related to trusted NLP and LLM tools as well as their Technical Readiness Level for wider use in mission-critical industries such as aviation. We conclude with recommendations to enhance trust and provide our open-source curated dataset to support further baseline testing and evaluation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel on many task-specific benchmarks, yet the mechanisms that drive this success remain poorly understood. We move from asking what these systems can do to asking how they process information. Our contribution is a task-agnostic method that builds a quantitative Cognitive Profile for any model. The profile is built around the Entropy Decay Curve-a plot of a model's normalised predictive uncertainty as context length grows. Across several state-of-the-art LLMs and diverse texts, the curves expose distinctive, stable profiles that depend on both model scale and text complexity. We also propose the Information Gain Span (IGS) as a single index that summarises the desirability of a decay pattern. Together, these tools offer a principled way to analyse and compare the internal dynamics of modern AI systems.

Autoregressive (AR) models have long dominated the landscape of large language models, driving progress across a wide range of tasks. Recently, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative, though their advantages over AR models remain underexplored. In this paper, we systematically study masked diffusion models in data-constrained settings where training involves repeated passes over limited data and find that they significantly outperform AR models when compute is abundant but data is scarce. Diffusion models make better use of repeated data, achieving lower validation loss and superior downstream performance. We find new scaling laws for diffusion models and derive a closed-form expression for the critical compute threshold at which diffusion begins to outperform AR. Finally, we explain why diffusion models excel in this regime: their randomized masking objective implicitly trains over a rich distribution of token orderings, acting as an implicit data augmentation that AR's fixed left-to-right factorization lacks. Our results suggest that when data, not compute, is the bottleneck, diffusion models offer a compelling alternative to the standard AR paradigm. Our code is available at: https://diffusion-scaling.github.io.

Grounding language in perception and action is a key challenge when building situated agents that can interact with humans, or other agents, via language. In the past, addressing this challenge has required manually designing the language grounding or curating massive datasets that associate language with the environment. We propose Ground-Compose-Reinforce, an end-to-end, neurosymbolic framework for training RL agents directly from high-level task specifications--without manually designed reward functions or other domain-specific oracles, and without massive datasets. These task specifications take the form of Reward Machines, automata-based representations that capture high-level task structure and are in some cases autoformalizable from natural language. Critically, we show that Reward Machines can be grounded using limited data by exploiting compositionality. Experiments in a custom Meta-World domain with only 350 labelled pretraining trajectories show that our framework faithfully elicits complex behaviours from high-level specifications--including behaviours that never appear in pretraining--while non-compositional approaches fail.

Scaling language models unlocks impressive capabilities, but the accompanying computational and memory demands make both training and deployment expensive. Existing efficiency efforts typically target either parameter sharing or adaptive computation, leaving open the question of how to attain both simultaneously. We introduce Mixture-of-Recursions (MoR), a unified framework that combines the two axes of efficiency inside a single Recursive Transformer. MoR reuses a shared stack of layers across recursion steps to achieve parameter efficiency, while lightweight routers enable adaptive token-level thinking by dynamically assigning different recursion depths to individual tokens. This allows MoR to focus quadratic attention computation only among tokens still active at a given recursion depth, further improving memory access efficiency by selectively caching only their key-value pairs. Beyond these core mechanisms, we also propose a KV sharing variant that reuses KV pairs from the first recursion, specifically designed to further decrease memory footprint. Across model scales ranging from 135M to 1.7B parameters, MoR forms a new Pareto frontier: at equal training FLOPs and smaller model sizes, it significantly lowers validation perplexity and improves few-shot accuracy, while delivering higher throughput compared with vanilla and existing recursive baselines. These gains demonstrate that MoR is an effective path towards large-model quality without incurring large-model cost.

Data attribution methods quantify the influence of training data on model outputs and are becoming increasingly relevant for a wide range of LLM research and applications, including dataset curation, model interpretability, data valuation. However, there remain critical gaps in systematic LLM-centric evaluation of data attribution methods. To this end, we introduce DATE-LM (Data Attribution Evaluation in Language Models), a unified benchmark for evaluating data attribution methods through real-world LLM applications. DATE-LM measures attribution quality through three key tasks -- training data selection, toxicity/bias filtering, and factual attribution. Our benchmark is designed for ease of use, enabling researchers to configure and run large-scale evaluations across diverse tasks and LLM architectures. Furthermore, we use DATE-LM to conduct a large-scale evaluation of existing data attribution methods. Our findings show that no single method dominates across all tasks, data attribution methods have trade-offs with simpler baselines, and method performance is sensitive to task-specific evaluation design. Finally, we release a public leaderboard for quick comparison of methods and to facilitate community engagement, with the motivation that DATE-LM can serve as a foundation for future data attribution research in LLMs.