Safe autonomous driving requires both accurate HD map construction and persistent awareness of traffic rules, even when their associated signs are no longer visible. However, existing methods either focus solely on geometric elements or treat rules as temporary classifications, failing to capture their persistent effectiveness across extended driving sequences. In this paper, we present PAMR (Persistent Autoregressive Mapping with Traffic Rules), a novel framework that performs autoregressive co-construction of lane vectors and traffic rules from visual observations. Our approach introduces two key mechanisms: Map-Rule Co-Construction for processing driving scenes in temporal segments, and Map-Rule Cache for maintaining rule consistency across these segments. To properly evaluate continuous and consistent map generation, we develop MapDRv2, featuring improved lane geometry annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAMR achieves superior performance in joint vector-rule mapping tasks, while maintaining persistent rule effectiveness throughout extended driving sequences.

Current visual reasoning methods mainly focus on exploring specific reasoning modes. Although improvements can be achieved in particular domains, they struggle to develop general reasoning capabilities. Inspired by this, we propose a novel adaptive reasoning paradigm, Mixture-of-Visual-Thoughts (MoVT), which unifies different reasoning modes within a single model and guides it to select the appropriate mode based on context. To achieve this, we introduce AdaVaR, a two-stage Adaptive Visual Reasoning learning framework: different modes are unified and learned during the supervised cold-start stage, and the mode selection capability is induced via an RL process with a carefully designed AdaGRPO algorithm. Extensive experiments show that AdaVaR effectively guides the model to learn and differentiate multiple modes and perform context-adaptive mode selection, achieving consistent improvement across various scenarios, highlighting MoVT as an effective solution for building general visual reasoning models.

In autoregressive language models, each token is sampled by conditioning on all the past tokens; the overall string has thus been sampled from the correct underlying joint distribution represented by the model. In contrast, masked diffusion language models generate text by unmasking tokens out of order and potentially in parallel. Generating an overall string sampled from the correct underlying joint distribution would (again) require exactly one token unmasking in every full-model forward pass. The more tokens unmasked in parallel, the further away the string is from the true joint; this can be seen in the resulting drop in accuracy (but, increase in speed). In this paper we devise a way to approximately sample multiple tokens from the joint distribution in a single full-model forward pass; we do so by developing a new lightweight single-layer "sampler" on top of an existing large diffusion LM. One forward pass of the full model can now be followed by multiple forward passes of only this sampler layer, to yield multiple unmasked tokens. Our sampler is trained to mimic exact joint sampling from the (frozen) full model. We show the effectiveness of our approximate joint sampling for both pretrained-only (Dream-7B-Base) and instruction-tuned (Dream-7B-Instruct) models on language modeling and math & coding tasks. When four tokens are unmasked for each full-model denoising step, our sampling algorithm achieves a MAUVE score of 0.87 (vs marginal baseline of 0.31) with respect to the true joint distribution. Masked diffusion language models Sahoo et al. (2024); Austin et al. (2021); Lou et al. (2023) involve generating text strings by starting from an all-masked sequence of tokens, and then iteratively replacing the masked tokens with tokens from the vocabulary, with each "denoising" forward pass unmasking one or a few tokens. As opposed to auto-regressive models which generate tokens left to right and one token in each forward pass, in masked diffusion models tokens can be potentially unmasked in any order and also potentially multiple tokens can be unmasked in parallel. The higher the number of tokens unmasked in parallel after a single denoising forward pass, the faster and cheaper the overall generation Sahoo et al. (2024).

As increasingly capable large language model (LLM)-based agents are developed, the potential harms caused by misalignment and loss of control grow correspondingly severe. To address these risks, we propose an approach that directly measures and controls the agency of these AI systems. We conceptualize the agency of LLM-based agents as a property independent of intelligence-related measures and consistent with the interdisciplinary literature on the concept of agency. We offer (1) agency as a system property operationalized along the dimensions of preference rigidity, independent operation, and goal persistence, (2) a representation engineering approach to the measurement and control of the agency of an LLM-based agent, and (3) regulatory tools enabled by this approach: mandated testing protocols, domain-specific agency limits, insurance frameworks that price risk based on agency, and agency ceilings to prevent societal-scale risks. We view our approach as a step toward reducing the risks that motivate the ``Scientist AI'' paradigm, while still capturing some of the benefits from limited agentic behavior.

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised significant safety concerns, particularly regarding "jailbreak" attacks that exploit adversarial prompts to bypass safety alignment mechanisms. Existing defense research primarily focuses on single-turn attacks, whereas multi-turn jailbreak attacks progressively break through safeguards through by concealing malicious intent and tactical manipulation, ultimately rendering conventional single-turn defenses ineffective. To address this critical challenge, we propose the Bidirectional Intention Inference Defense (BIID). The method integrates forward request-based intention inference with backward response-based intention retrospection, establishing a bidirectional synergy mechanism to detect risks concealed within seemingly benign inputs, thereby constructing a more robust guardrails that effectively prevents harmful content generation. The proposed method undergoes systematic evaluation compared with a no-defense baseline and seven representative defense methods across three LLMs and two safety benchmarks under 10 different attack methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) across both single-turn and multi-turn jailbreak attempts, outperforming all existing baseline methods while effectively maintaining practical utility. Notably, comparative experiments across three multi-turn safety datasets further validate the proposed model's significant advantages over other defense approaches.

ABSTRACT Dialect speech embodies rich cultural and linguistic diversity, yet building text-to-speech (TTS) systems for dialects remains challenging due to scarce data, inconsistent orthographies, and complex phonetic variation. To address these issues, we present DiaMoE-TTS, a unified IP A-based framework that standardizes phonetic representations and resolves grapheme-to-phoneme ambiguities. Built upon the F5-TTS architecture, the system introduces a dialect-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to model phonological differences and employs parameter-efficient adaptation with Low-Rank Adaptors (LoRA) and Conditioning Adapters for rapid transfer to new dialects. Unlike approaches dependent on large-scale or proprietary resources, DiaMoE-TTS enables scalable, open-data-driven synthesis. Experiments demonstrate natural and expressive speech generation, achieving zero-shot performance on unseen dialects and specialized domains such as Peking Opera with only a few hours of data.

Designing realistic multi-object scenes requires not only generating images, but also planning spatial layouts that respect semantic relations and physical plausibility. On one hand, while recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality image generation, they lack explicit spatial reasoning, leading to unrealistic object layouts. On the other hand, traditional spatial planning methods in robotics emphasize geometric and relational consistency, but they struggle to capture semantic richness in visual scenes. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose LayoutAgent, an agentic framework that unifies vision-language reasoning with compositional diffusion for layout generation. Given multiple input images with target objects in them, our method first employs visual-language model to preprocess the inputs through segmentation, object size estimation, scene graph construction, and prompt rewriting. Then we leverage compositional diffusion-a method traditionally used in robotics-to synthesize bounding boxes that respect object relations encoded in the scene graph for spatial layouts. In the end, a foreground-conditioned image generator composes the complete scene by rendering the objects into the planned layout guided by designed prompts. Experiments demonstrate that LayoutAgent outperforms other state-of-the-art layout generation models in layout coherence, spatial realism and aesthetic alignment.

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) have emerged as a promising solution to the scaling limits of two-dimensional designs, offering higher integration density, shorter interconnects, and improved performance. As design complexity increases, effective space planning becomes essential to reduce dead space and ensure layout quality. This study investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for 3D IC space planning through a post-order slicing tree representation, which guarantees legal space plans while aiming to minimize dead space. Open-source LLMs were fine-tuned on large-scale synthetic datasets and further evaluated on MCNC-derived 3D benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework achieves a favorable balance between runtime efficiency, legality, and dead-space reduction, with zero-dead-space layouts obtained in a significant portion of test cases under practical runtime budgets. Beyond synthetic benchmarks, the method generalizes to MCNC cases such as ami33 and ami49, though larger and irregular instances remain challenging. The approach also shows potential for cross-domain applications, including logistics and 3D object placement, where spatial efficiency is critical. Overall, the results suggest that LLM-based space planning can serve as a data-driven complement to traditional electronic design automation (EDA) methods, providing new insights for scalable 3D layout generation.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integral as productivity assistants, but existing benchmarks fall short in rigorously evaluating their real-world instruction-following capabilities. Current benchmarks often (i) lack sufficient multilinguality, (ii) fail to capture the implicit constraints inherent in user requests, and (iii) overlook the complexities of multi-turn dialogue. To address these critical gaps and provide a more realistic assessment, we introduce TRUEBench (Trustworthy Real-world Usage Evaluation Benchmark)1, a novel benchmark specifically designed for LLM-based productivity assistants. TRUEBench distinguishes itself by featuring input prompts across 12 languages, incorporating intra-instance multilingual instructions, employing rigorous evaluation criteria to capture both explicit and implicit constraints, and including complex multi-turn dialogue scenarios with both accumulating constraints and context switches. Furthermore, to ensure reliability in evaluation, we refined constraints using an LLM validator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TRUEBench presents significantly greater challenges than existing benchmarks; for instance, a strong model like OpenAI o1 achieved only a 69.07% overall pass rate. TRUEBench offers a demanding and realistic assessment of LLMs in practical productivity settings, highlighting their capabilities and limitations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance on diverse medical benchmarks, highlighting their potential in supporting real-world clinical tasks. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key approach for mitigating knowledge gaps and hallucinations by incorporating external medical information. However, RAG still struggles with complex medical questions that require intensive reasoning, as surface-level input often fails to reflect the true knowledge needs of the task. Existing methods typically focus on refining queries without explicitly modeling the reasoning process, limiting their ability to retrieve and integrate clinically relevant knowledge. In this work, we propose RAR$^2$, a joint learning framework that improves both Reasoning-Augmented Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning. RAR$^2$ constructs a thought process to uncover implicit knowledge requirements and uses it to guide retrieval and answer generation. We build a training dataset of mixed preference pairs and apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to train the model. Moreover, we design two test-time scaling strategies to explore the boundaries of our framework. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RAR$^2$ across several biomedical question answering datasets, outperforming RAG baselines with or without fine-tuning.