This paper introduces the Fluidity Index (FI) to quantify model adaptability in dynamic, scaling environments. The benchmark evaluates response accuracy based on deviations in initial, current, and future environment states, assessing context switching and continuity. We distinguish between closed-ended and open-ended benchmarks, prioritizing closed-loop open-ended real-world benchmarks to test adaptability. The approach measures a model's ability to understand, predict, and adjust to state changes in scaling environments. A truly super-intelligent model should exhibit at least second-order adaptability, enabling self-sustained computation through digital replenishment for optimal fluidity.

Curiosity serves as a pivotal conduit for human beings to discover and learn new knowledge. Recent advancements of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing have sparked discussions regarding whether these models possess capability of curiosity-driven learning akin to humans. In this paper, starting from the human curiosity assessment questionnaire Five-Dimensional Curiosity scale Revised (5DCR), we design a comprehensive evaluation framework that covers dimensions such as Information Seeking, Thrill Seeking, and Social Curiosity to assess the extent of curiosity exhibited by LLMs. The results demonstrate that LLMs exhibit a stronger thirst for knowledge than humans but still tend to make conservative choices when faced with uncertain environments. We further investigated the relationship between curiosity and thinking of LLMs, confirming that curious behaviors can enhance the model's reasoning and active learning abilities. These findings suggest that LLMs have the potential to exhibit curiosity similar to that of humans, providing experimental support for the future development of learning capabilities and innovative research in LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel on general-purpose NLP benchmarks, yet their capabilities in specialized domains remain underexplored. In e-commerce, existing evaluations-such as EcomInstruct, ChineseEcomQA, eCeLLM, and Shopping MMLU-suffer from limited task diversity (e.g., lacking product guidance and after-sales issues), limited task modalities (e.g., absence of multimodal data), synthetic or curated data, and a narrow focus on English and Chinese, leaving practitioners without reliable tools to assess models on complex, real-world shopping scenarios. We introduce EcomEval, a comprehensive multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in e-commerce. EcomEval covers six categories and 37 tasks (including 8 multimodal tasks), sourced primarily from authentic customer queries and transaction logs, reflecting the noisy and heterogeneous nature of real business interactions. To ensure both quality and scalability of reference answers, we adopt a semi-automatic pipeline in which large models draft candidate responses subsequently reviewed and modified by over 50 expert annotators with strong e-commerce and multilingual expertise. We define difficulty levels for each question and task category by averaging evaluation scores across models with different sizes and capabilities, enabling challenge-oriented and fine-grained assessment. EcomEval also spans seven languages-including five low-resource Southeast Asian languages-offering a multilingual perspective absent from prior work.

Differentially private (DP) transfer learning, i.e., fine-tuning a pretrained model on private data, is the current state-of-the-art approach for training large models under privacy constraints. We focus on two key hyperparameters in this setting: the clipping bound $C$ and batch size $B$. We show a clear mismatch between the current theoretical understanding of how to choose an optimal $C$ (stronger privacy requires smaller $C$) and empirical outcomes (larger $C$ performs better under strong privacy), caused by changes in the gradient distributions. Assuming a limited compute budget (fixed epochs), we demonstrate that the existing heuristics for tuning $B$ do not work, while cumulative DP noise better explains whether smaller or larger batches perform better. We also highlight how the common practice of using a single $(C,B)$ setting across tasks can lead to suboptimal performance. We find that performance drops especially when moving between loose and tight privacy and between plentiful and limited compute, which we explain by analyzing clipping as a form of gradient re-weighting and examining cumulative DP noise.

Large Language Models are increasingly adopted as critical tools for accelerating innovation. This paper identifies and formalizes a systemic risk inherent in this paradigm: \textbf{Black Box Absorption}. We define this as the process by which the opaque internal architectures of LLM platforms, often operated by large-scale service providers, can internalize, generalize, and repurpose novel concepts contributed by users during interaction. This mechanism threatens to undermine the foundational principles of innovation economics by creating severe informational and structural asymmetries between individual creators and platform operators, thereby jeopardizing the long-term sustainability of the innovation ecosystem. To analyze this challenge, we introduce two core concepts: the idea unit, representing the transportable functional logic of an innovation, and idea safety, a multidimensional standard for its protection. This paper analyzes the mechanisms of absorption and proposes a concrete governance and engineering agenda to mitigate these risks, ensuring that creator contributions remain traceable, controllable, and equitable.

We study retrieval design for code-focused generation tasks under realistic compute budgets. Using two complementary tasks from Long Code Arena -- code completion and bug localization -- we systematically compare retrieval configurations across various context window sizes along three axes: (i) chunking strategy, (ii) similarity scoring, and (iii) splitting granularity. (1) For PL-PL, sparse BM25 with word-level splitting is the most effective and practical, significantly outperforming dense alternatives while being an order of magnitude faster. (2) For NL-PL, proprietary dense encoders (Voyager-3 family) consistently beat sparse retrievers, however requiring 100x larger latency. (3) Optimal chunk size scales with available context: 32-64 line chunks work best at small budgets, and whole-file retrieval becomes competitive at 16000 tokens. (4) Simple line-based chunking matches syntax-aware splitting across budgets. (5) Retrieval latency varies by up to 200x across configurations; BPE-based splitting is needlessly slow, and BM25 + word splitting offers the best quality-latency trade-off. Thus, we provide evidence-based recommendations for implementing effective code-oriented RAG systems based on task requirements, model constraints, and computational efficiency.

Generalization is a key challenge in machine learning, specifically in reasoning tasks, where models are expected to solve problems more complex than those encountered during training. Existing approaches typically train reasoning models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping input instances to solutions. While this allows models to learn useful heuristics from data, it often results in limited generalization beyond the training distribution. In this work, we propose a novel approach to reasoning generalization by learning energy landscapes over the solution spaces of smaller, more tractable subproblems. At test time, we construct a global energy landscape for a given problem by combining the energy functions of multiple subproblems. This compositional approach enables the incorporation of additional constraints during inference, allowing the construction of energy landscapes for problems of increasing difficulty. To improve the sample quality from this newly constructed energy landscape, we introduce Parallel Energy Minimization (PEM). We evaluate our approach on a wide set of reasoning problems. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its ability to generalize to larger and more complex problems. Project website can be found at: https://alexoarga.github.io/compositional_reasoning/

Free-moving object reconstruction from monocular video remains challenging, particularly without reliable pose or depth cues and under arbitrary object motion. We introduce OnlineSplatter, a novel online feed-forward framework generating high-quality, object-centric 3D Gaussians directly from RGB frames without requiring camera pose, depth priors, or bundle optimization. Our approach anchors reconstruction using the first frame and progressively refines the object representation through a dense Gaussian primitive field, maintaining constant computational cost regardless of video sequence length. Our core contribution is a dual-key memory module combining latent appearance-geometry keys with explicit directional keys, robustly fusing current frame features with temporally aggregated object states. This design enables effective handling of free-moving objects via spatial-guided memory readout and an efficient sparsification mechanism, ensuring comprehensive yet compact object coverage. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that OnlineSplatter significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pose-free reconstruction baselines, consistently improving with more observations while maintaining constant memory and runtime.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on final-answer correctness is the dominant paradigm. This approach, however, provides a coarse signal for model improvement and overlooks the quality of the underlying reasoning process. We argue that a more granular evaluation of reasoning offers a more effective path to building robust models. We decompose reasoning quality into two dimensions: relevance and coherence. Relevance measures if a step is grounded in the problem; coherence measures if it follows logically from prior steps. To measure these aspects reliably, we introduce causal stepwise evaluation (CaSE). This method assesses each reasoning step using only its preceding context, which avoids hindsight bias. We validate CaSE against human judgments on our new expert-annotated benchmarks, MRa-GSM8K and MRa-MATH. More importantly, we show that curating training data with CaSE-evaluated relevance and coherence directly improves final task performance. Our work provides a scalable framework for analyzing, debugging, and improving LLM reasoning, demonstrating the practical value of moving beyond validity checks.

Assessing communication and collaboration at scale depends on a labor intensive task of coding communication data into categories according to different frameworks. Prior research has established that ChatGPT can be directly instructed with coding rubrics to code the communication data and achieves accuracy comparable to human raters. However, whether the coding from ChatGPT or similar AI technology exhibits bias against different demographic groups, such as gender and race, remains unclear. To fill this gap, this paper investigates ChatGPT-based automated coding of communication data using a typical coding framework for collaborative problem solving, examining differences across gender and racial groups. The analysis draws on data from three types of collaborative tasks: negotiation, problem solving, and decision making. Our results show that ChatGPT-based coding exhibits no significant bias across gender and racial groups, paving the road for its adoption in large-scale assessment of collaboration and communication.