Decision-makers often possess insufficient information to render a confident decision. In these cases, the decision-maker can often undertake actions to acquire the necessary information about the problem at hand, e.g., by consulting knowledgeable authorities or by conducting experiments. Importantly, different levers of information acquisition come with different costs, posing the challenge of selecting the actions that are both informative and cost-effective. In this work, we propose CuriosiTree, a heuristic-based, test-time policy for zero-shot information acquisition in large language models (LLMs). CuriosiTree employs a greedy tree search to estimate the expected information gain of each action and strategically chooses actions based on a balance of anticipated information gain and associated cost. Empirical validation in a clinical diagnosis simulation shows that CuriosiTree enables cost-effective integration of heterogenous sources of information, and outperforms baseline action selection strategies in selecting action sequences that enable accurate diagnosis.

Large language models are increasingly used in strategic decision-making settings, yet evidence shows that, like humans, they often deviate from full rationality. In this study, we compare LLMs and humans using experimental paradigms directly adapted from behavioral game-theory research. We focus on two well-studied strategic games, Rock-Paper-Scissors and the Prisoner's Dilemma, which are well known for revealing systematic departures from rational play in human subjects. By placing LLMs in identical experimental conditions, we evaluate whether their behaviors exhibit the bounded rationality characteristic of humans. Our findings show that LLMs reproduce familiar human heuristics, such as outcome-based strategy switching and increased cooperation when future interaction is possible, but they apply these rules more rigidly and demonstrate weaker sensitivity to the dynamic changes in the game environment. Model-level analyses reveal distinctive architectural signatures in strategic behavior, and even reasoning models sometimes struggle to find effective strategies in adaptive situations. These results indicate that current LLMs capture only a partial form of human-like bounded rationality and highlight the need for training methods that encourage flexible opponent modeling and stronger context awareness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced great advancements in the last year resulting in an increase of these models in several fields to face natural language tasks. The integration of these models in robotics can also help to improve several aspects such as human-robot interaction, navigation, planning and decision-making. Therefore, this paper introduces llama\_ros, a tool designed to integrate quantized Large Language Models (LLMs) into robotic systems using ROS 2. Leveraging llama.cpp, a highly optimized runtime engine, llama\_ros enables the efficient execution of quantized LLMs as edge artificial intelligence (AI) in robotics systems with resource-constrained environments, addressing the challenges of computational efficiency and memory limitations. By deploying quantized LLMs, llama\_ros empowers robots to leverage the natural language understanding and generation for enhanced decision-making and interaction which can be paired with prompt engineering, knowledge graphs, ontologies or other tools to improve the capabilities of autonomous robots. Additionally, this paper provides insights into some use cases of using llama\_ros for planning and explainability in robotics.

Recently, we have witnessed the great success of the generalist model in natural language processing. The generalist model is a general framework trained with massive data and is able to process various downstream tasks simultaneously. Encouraged by their impressive performance, an increasing number of researchers are venturing into the realm of applying these models to computer vision tasks. However, the inputs and outputs of vision tasks are more diverse, and it is difficult to summarize them as a unified representation. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the vision generalist models, delving into their characteristics and capabilities within the field. First, we review the background, including the datasets, tasks, and benchmarks. Then, we dig into the design of frameworks that have been proposed in existing research, while also introducing the techniques employed to enhance their performance. To better help the researchers comprehend the area, we take a brief excursion into related domains, shedding light on their interconnections and potential synergies. To conclude, we provide some real-world application scenarios, undertake a thorough examination of the persistent challenges, and offer insights into possible directions for future research endeavors.

In outside knowledge visual question answering (OK-VQA), the model must identify relevant visual information within an image and incorporate external knowledge to accurately respond to a question. Extending this task to a visually grounded dialogue setting based on videos, a conversational model must both recognize pertinent visual details over time and answer questions where the required information is not necessarily present in the visual information. Moreover, the context of the overall conversation must be considered for the subsequent dialogue. To explore this task, we introduce a dataset comprised of $2,017$ videos with $5,986$ human-annotated dialogues consisting of $40,954$ interleaved dialogue turns. While the dialogue context is visually grounded in specific video segments, the questions further require external knowledge that is not visually present. Thus, the model not only has to identify relevant video parts but also leverage external knowledge to converse within the dialogue. We further provide several baselines evaluated on our dataset and show future challenges associated with this task. The dataset is made publicly available here: https://github.com/c-patsch/OKCV.

Text-guided image editing, fueled by recent advancements in generative AI, is becoming increasingly widespread. This trend highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to verify text-guided edits and assess their quality. To address this need, we introduce EditInspector, a novel benchmark for evaluation of text-guided image edits, based on human annotations collected using an extensive template for edit verification. We leverage EditInspector to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art (SoTA) vision and language models in assessing edits across various dimensions, including accuracy, artifact detection, visual quality, seamless integration with the image scene, adherence to common sense, and the ability to describe edit-induced changes. Our findings indicate that current models struggle to evaluate edits comprehensively and frequently hallucinate when describing the changes. To address these challenges, we propose two novel methods that outperform SoTA models in both artifact detection and difference caption generation.

Existing benchmarks for assessing the spatio-temporal understanding and reasoning abilities of video language models are susceptible to score inflation due to the presence of shortcut solutions based on superficial visual or textual cues. This paper mitigates the challenges in accurately assessing model performance by introducing the Minimal Video Pairs (MVP) benchmark, a simple shortcut-aware video QA benchmark for assessing the physical understanding of video language models. The benchmark is comprised of 55K high-quality multiple-choice video QA examples focusing on physical world understanding. Examples are curated from nine video data sources, spanning first-person egocentric and exocentric videos, robotic interaction data, and cognitive science intuitive physics benchmarks. To mitigate shortcut solutions that rely on superficial visual or textual cues and biases, each sample in MVP has a minimal-change pair -- a visually similar video accompanied by an identical question but an opposing answer. To answer a question correctly, a model must provide correct answers for both examples in the minimal-change pair; as such, models that solely rely on visual or textual biases would achieve below random performance. Human performance on MVP is 92.9\%, while the best open-source state-of-the-art video-language model achieves 40.2\% compared to random performance at 25\%.

How can we reliably simulate future driving scenarios under a wide range of ego driving behaviors? Recent driving world models, developed exclusively on real-world driving data composed mainly of safe expert trajectories, struggle to follow hazardous or non-expert behaviors, which are rare in such data. This limitation restricts their applicability to tasks such as policy evaluation. In this work, we address this challenge by enriching real-world human demonstrations with diverse non-expert data collected from a driving simulator (e.g., CARLA), and building a controllable world model trained on this heterogeneous corpus. Starting with a video generator featuring a diffusion transformer architecture, we devise several strategies to effectively integrate conditioning signals and improve prediction controllability and fidelity. The resulting model, ReSim, enables Reliable Simulation of diverse open-world driving scenarios under various actions, including hazardous non-expert ones. To close the gap between high-fidelity simulation and applications that require reward signals to judge different actions, we introduce a Video2Reward module that estimates a reward from ReSim's simulated future. Our ReSim paradigm achieves up to 44% higher visual fidelity, improves controllability for both expert and non-expert actions by over 50%, and boosts planning and policy selection performance on NAVSIM by 2% and 25%, respectively.

Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA) is a promising field for developing clinical decision support systems, yet progress is often limited by the available datasets, which can lack clinical complexity and visual diversity. To address these gaps, we introduce Kvasir-VQA-x1, a new, large-scale dataset for gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy. Our work significantly expands upon the original Kvasir-VQA by incorporating 159,549 new question-answer pairs that are designed to test deeper clinical reasoning. We developed a systematic method using large language models to generate these questions, which are stratified by complexity to better assess a model's inference capabilities. To ensure our dataset prepares models for real-world clinical scenarios, we have also introduced a variety of visual augmentations that mimic common imaging artifacts. The dataset is structured to support two main evaluation tracks: one for standard VQA performance and another to test model robustness against these visual perturbations. By providing a more challenging and clinically relevant benchmark, Kvasir-VQA-x1 aims to accelerate the development of more reliable and effective multimodal AI systems for use in clinical settings. The dataset is fully accessible and adheres to FAIR data principles, making it a valuable resource for the wider research community. Code and data: https://github.com/Simula/Kvasir-VQA-x1 and https://huggingface.co/datasets/SimulaMet/Kvasir-VQA-x1

Indirect Prompt Injection attacks exploit the inherent limitation of Large Language Models (LLMs) to distinguish between instructions and data in their inputs. Despite numerous defense proposals, the systematic evaluation against adaptive adversaries remains limited, even when successful attacks can have wide security and privacy implications, and many real-world LLM-based applications remain vulnerable. We present the results of LLMail-Inject, a public challenge simulating a realistic scenario in which participants adaptively attempted to inject malicious instructions into emails in order to trigger unauthorized tool calls in an LLM-based email assistant. The challenge spanned multiple defense strategies, LLM architectures, and retrieval configurations, resulting in a dataset of 208,095 unique attack submissions from 839 participants. We release the challenge code, the full dataset of submissions, and our analysis demonstrating how this data can provide new insights into the instruction-data separation problem. We hope this will serve as a foundation for future research towards practical structural solutions to prompt injection.