Technology-enhanced learning environments often help students retrieve relevant learning content for questions arising during self-paced study. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as novel aids for information retrieval during learning. While LLMs are effective for general-purpose question-answering, they typically lack alignment with the domain knowledge of specific course materials such as textbooks and slides. We investigate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and GraphRAG, a knowledge graph-enhanced RAG approach, for page-level question answering in an undergraduate mathematics textbook. While RAG has been effective for retrieving discrete, contextually relevant passages, GraphRAG may excel in modeling interconnected concepts and hierarchical knowledge structures. We curate a dataset of 477 question-answer pairs, each tied to a distinct textbook page. We then compare the standard embedding-based RAG methods to GraphRAG for evaluating both retrieval accuracy-whether the correct page is retrieved-and generated answer quality via F1 scores. Our findings show that embedding-based RAG achieves higher retrieval accuracy and better F1 scores compared to GraphRAG, which tends to retrieve excessive and sometimes irrelevant content due to its entity-based structure. We also explored re-ranking the retrieved pages with LLM and observed mixed results, including performance drop and hallucinations when dealing with larger context windows. Overall, this study highlights both the promises and challenges of page-level retrieval systems in educational contexts, emphasizing the need for more refined retrieval methods to build reliable AI tutoring solutions in providing reference page numbers.

We prove under practical assumptions that Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) introduces an intrinsic distance-dependent bias in attention scores that limits RoPE's ability to model long-context. RoPE extension methods may alleviate this issue, but they typically require post-hoc adjustments after pretraining, such as rescaling or hyperparameters retuning. This paper introduces Token-Aware Phase Attention (TAPA), a new positional encoding method that incorporates a learnable phase function into the attention mechanism. TAPA preserves token interactions over long range, extends to longer contexts with direct and light fine-tuning, extrapolates to unseen lengths, and attains significantly lower perplexity on long-context than RoPE families.

The paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increasingly shifted toward agentic applications, where web browsing capabilities are fundamental for retrieving information from diverse online sources. However, existing open-source web agents either demonstrate limited information-seeking abilities on complex tasks or lack transparent implementations. In this work, we identify that the key challenge lies in the scarcity of challenging data for information seeking. To address this limitation, we introduce WebExplorer: a systematic data generation approach using model-based exploration and iterative, long-to-short query evolution. This method creates challenging query-answer pairs that require multi-step reasoning and complex web navigation. By leveraging our curated high-quality dataset, we successfully develop advanced web agent WebExplorer-8B through supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. Our model supports 128K context length and up to 100 tool calling turns, enabling long-horizon problem solving. Across diverse information-seeking benchmarks, WebExplorer-8B achieves the state-of-the-art performance at its scale. Notably, as an 8B-sized model, WebExplorer-8B is able to effectively search over an average of 16 turns after RL training, achieving higher accuracy than WebSailor-72B on BrowseComp-en/zh and attaining the best performance among models up to 100B parameters on WebWalkerQA and FRAMES. Beyond these information-seeking tasks, our model also achieves strong generalization on the HLE benchmark even though it is only trained on knowledge-intensive QA data. These results highlight our approach as a practical path toward long-horizon web agents.

Enhancing the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to interpret sheet music is a crucial step toward building AI musicians. However, current research lacks both evaluation benchmarks and training data for sheet music reasoning. Inspired by mathematics, where simple operations yield infinite verifiable problems, we introduce a novel approach that treats core music theory rules, such as those governing beats and intervals, as programmatic functions to systematically synthesize a vast and diverse corpus of sheet music reasoning problems. This approach allows us to introduce a data synthesis framework that generates verifiable sheet music questions in both textual and visual modalities, leading to the Synthetic Sheet Music Reasoning Benchmark (SSMR-Bench) and a complementary training set. Evaluation results on SSMR-Bench highlight the key role reasoning plays in interpreting sheet music, while also pointing out the ongoing challenges in understanding sheet music in a visual format. By leveraging synthetic data for RL VR, all models show significant improvements on the SSMR-Bench. Additionally, they also demonstrate considerable advancements on previously established human-crafted benchmarks, such as MusicTheoryBench and the music subset of MMMU. Finally, our results show that the enhanced reasoning ability can also facilitate music composition. "The sheet music is the language of musicians." Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have inspired researchers to explore the potential of developing AI musicians (Qu et al., 2025; Bradshaw & Colton, 2025; Wang et al., 2024). Given that sheet music is the universal language of musicians, the ability to read and interpret it is an essential step for AI musicians (Y uan et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2025). As illustrated in Figure 1, sheet music reasoning differs fundamentally from Music Knowledge QA (Li et al., 2024), which evaluates memorized knowledge, and from sheet music recognition (Chen et al., 2025a), which focuses on identifying notation from images.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a core paradigm in document question answering tasks. However, existing methods have limitations when dealing with multimodal documents: one category of methods relies on layout analysis and text extraction, which can only utilize explicit text information and struggle to capture images or unstructured content; the other category treats document segmentation as visual input and directly passes it to visual language models (VLMs) for processing, yet it ignores the semantic advantages of text, leading to suboptimal retrieval and generation results. To address these research gaps, we propose the Co-Modality-based RAG (CMRAG) framework, which can simultaneously leverage texts and images for more accurate retrieval and generation. Our framework includes two key components: (1) a Unified Encoding Model (UEM) that projects queries, parsed text, and images into a shared embedding space via triplet-based training, and (2) a Unified Co-Modality-informed Retrieval (UCMR) method that statistically normalizes similarity scores to effectively fuse cross-modal signals. To support research in this direction, we further construct and release a large-scale triplet dataset of (query, text, image) examples. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework consistently outperforms single-modality--based RAG in multiple visual document question-answering (VDQA) benchmarks. The findings of this paper show that integrating co-modality information into the RAG framework in a unified manner is an effective approach to improving the performance of complex VDQA systems.

In recent years, integrating multimodal understanding and generation into a single unified model has emerged as a promising paradigm. While this approach achieves strong results in text-to-image (T2I) generation, it still struggles with precise image editing. We attribute this limitation to an imbalanced division of responsibilities. The understanding module primarily functions as a translator that encodes user instructions into semantic conditions, while the generation module must simultaneously act as designer and painter, inferring the original layout, identifying the target editing region, and rendering the new content. This imbalance is counterintuitive because the understanding module is typically trained with several times more data on complex reasoning tasks than the generation module. To address this issue, we introduce Draw-In-Mind (DIM), a dataset comprising two complementary subsets: (i) DIM-T2I, containing 14M long-context image-text pairs to enhance complex instruction comprehension; and (ii) DIM-Edit, consisting of 233K chain-of-thought imaginations generated by GPT-4o, serving as explicit design blueprints for image edits. We connect a frozen Qwen2.5-VL-3B with a trainable SANA1.5-1.6B via a lightweight two-layer MLP, and train it on the proposed DIM dataset, resulting in DIM-4.6B-T2I/Edit. Despite its modest parameter scale, DIM-4.6B-Edit achieves SOTA or competitive performance on the ImgEdit and GEdit-Bench benchmarks, outperforming much larger models such as UniWorld-V1 and Step1X-Edit. These findings demonstrate that explicitly assigning the design responsibility to the understanding module provides significant benefits for image editing. Our dataset and models are available at https://github.com/showlab/DIM.

Aligning AI with human values is a pressing unsolved problem. To address the lack of quantitative metrics for value alignment, we propose EigenBench: a black-box method for comparatively benchmarking language models' values. Given an ensemble of models, a constitution describing a value system, and a dataset of scenarios, our method returns a vector of scores quantifying each model's alignment to the given constitution. To produce these scores, each model judges the outputs of other models across many scenarios, and these judgments are aggregated with EigenTrust (Kamvar et al., 2003), yielding scores that reflect a weighted consensus judgment of the whole ensemble. EigenBench uses no ground truth labels, as it is designed to quantify subjective traits for which reasonable judges may disagree on the correct label. Hence, to validate our method, we collect human judgments on the same ensemble of models and show that EigenBench's judgments align closely with those of human evaluators. We further demonstrate that EigenBench can recover model rankings on the GPQA benchmark without access to objective labels, supporting its viability as a framework for evaluating subjective values for which no ground truths exist.

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable effective decision-making over long timescales. Existing approaches, while promising, have yet to realize the benefits of large-scale training. In this work, we identify and solve several key challenges in scaling online hierarchical RL to high-throughput environments. We propose Scalable Option Learning (SOL), a highly scalable hierarchical RL algorithm which achieves a ~35x higher throughput compared to existing hierarchical methods. To demonstrate SOL's performance and scalability, we train hierarchical agents using 30 billion frames of experience on the complex game of NetHack, significantly surpassing flat agents and demonstrating positive scaling trends. We also validate SOL on MiniHack and Mujoco environments, showcasing its general applicability. Our code is open sourced at: github.com/facebookresearch/sol.

Personas have been widely used to understand and communicate user needs in human-centred design. Despite their utility, they may fail to meet the demands of iterative workflows due to their static nature, limited engagement, and inability to adapt to evolving design needs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) pave the way for more engaging and adaptive approaches to user representation. This paper introduces Interactive Virtual Personas (IVPs): multimodal, LLM-driven, conversational user simulations that designers can interview, brainstorm with, and gather feedback from in real time via voice interface. We conducted a qualitative study with eight professional UX designers, employing an IVP named "Alice" across three design activities: user research, ideation, and prototype evaluation. Our findings demonstrate the potential of IVPs to expedite information gathering, inspire design solutions, and provide rapid user-like feedback. However, designers raised concerns about biases, over-optimism, the challenge of ensuring authenticity without real stakeholder input, and the inability of the IVP to fully replicate the nuances of human interaction. Our participants emphasised that IVPs should be viewed as a complement to, not a replacement for, real user engagement. We discuss strategies for prompt engineering, human-in-the-loop integration, and ethical considerations for effective and responsible IVP use in design. Finally, our work contributes to the growing body of research on generative AI in the design process by providing insights into UX designers' experiences of LLM-powered interactive personas.

Curriculum learning, a training technique where data is presented to the model in order of example difficulty (e.g., from simpler to more complex documents), has shown limited success for pre-training language models. In this work, we investigate whether curriculum learning becomes competitive if we replace conventional human-centered difficulty metrics with one that more closely corresponds to example difficulty as observed during model training. Specifically, we experiment with sorting training examples by their \textit{training data influence}, a score which estimates the effect of individual training examples on the model's output. Models trained on our curricula are able to outperform ones trained in random order by over 10 percentage points in benchmarks, confirming that curriculum learning is beneficial for language model pre-training, as long as a more model-centric notion of difficulty is adopted.