Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1, excel at advanced reasoning tasks like math and coding via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), but still struggle with puzzles solvable by humans without domain knowledge. We introduce ENIGMATA, the first comprehensive suite tailored for improving LLMs with puzzle reasoning skills. It includes 36 tasks across 7 categories, each with: 1) a generator that produces unlimited examples with controllable difficulty, and 2) a rule-based verifier for automatic evaluation. This generator-verifier design supports scalable, multi-task RL training, fine-grained analysis, and seamless RLVR integration. We further propose ENIGMATA-Eval, a rigorous benchmark, and develop optimized multi-task RLVR strategies.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled automated dataset labeling with minimal human supervision. While majority voting across multiple LLMs can improve label reliability by mitigating individual model biases, it incurs high computational costs due to repeated querying. In this work, we propose a novel online framework, Cost-aware Majority Voting (CaMVo), for efficient and accurate LLM-based dataset annotation. CaMVo adaptively selects a subset of LLMs for each data instance based on contextual embeddings, balancing confidence and cost without requiring pre-training or ground-truth labels. Leveraging a LinUCB-based selection mechanism and a Bayesian estimator over confidence scores, CaMVo estimates a lower bound on labeling accuracy for each LLM and aggregates responses through weighted majority voting. Our empirical evaluation on the MMLU and IMDBMovie Review datasets demonstrates that CaMVo achieves comparable or superior accuracy to full majority voting while significantly reducing labeling costs. This establishes CaMVo as a practical and robust solution for cost-efficient annotation in dynamic labeling environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into the software engineering ecosystem. Their test-time compute (TTC) reasoning capabilities show significant potential for understanding program logic and semantics beyond mere token recognition. However, current benchmarks for code reasoning lack a formal, program-centric deductive framework to ensure sound evaluation, and are incapable of assessing whether models genuinely reason about program semantics or merely exploit superficial associations between natural language and code tokens. To bridge this gap, we introduce TF-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLM reasoning based on type inference in System F, a task we refer to as program semantics reasoning. By employing verified transformations to remove semantically irrelevant natural language, we construct TF-Benchpure, a purely semanticsdriven variant of TF-Bench. Our analysis reveals substantial limitations in state-of-the-art LLMs, with the best-performing LLM (Claude-3.7-sonnet)

Object binding, the brain's ability to bind the many features that collectively represent an object into a coherent whole, is central to human cognition. It groups low-level perceptual features into high-level object representations, stores those objects efficiently and compositionally in memory, and supports human reasoning about individual object instances. While prior work often imposes object-centric attention (e.g., Slot Attention) explicitly to probe these benefits, it remains unclear whether this ability naturally emerges in pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs). Intuitively, they could: recognizing which patches belong to the same object should be useful for downstream prediction and thus guide attention. Motivated by the quadratic nature of self-attention, we hypothesize that ViTs represent whether two patches belong to the same object, a property we term IsSameObject.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performance by leveraging vast pretraining corpora, yet their performance remains suboptimal in knowledge-intensive domains such as medicine and scientific research, where high factual precision is required. While synthetic data provides a promising avenue for augmenting domain knowledge, existing methods frequently generate redundant samples that do not align with the model's true knowledge gaps. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Structural Entropy-guided Knowledge Navigator (SENATOR) framework that addresses the intrinsic knowledge deficiencies of LLMs. Our approach employs the Structure Entropy (SE) metric to quantify uncertainty along knowledge graph paths and leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to selectively explore regions where the model lacks domain-specific knowledge. Guided by these insights, the framework generates targeted synthetic data for supervised fine-tuning, enabling continuous self-improvement. Experimental results on LLaMA-3 and Qwen2 across multiple domain-specific benchmarks show that SENATOR effectively detects and repairs knowledge deficiencies, achieving notable performance improvements.

However, isolating these visual features is challenging due to the absence of annotated datasets.

Diffusion-based virtual staining methods of histopathology images have demonstrated outstanding potential for stain normalization and cross-dye staining (e.g., hematoxylin-eosin to immunohistochemistry). However, achieving pathology-correct cross-dye virtual staining with versatile tone controls poses significantchallenges due to the difficulty of decoupling the given pathology and tone con-ditions.

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various signal geometries. Despite this versatility, generalizing the attention mechanism to scenarios where data is presented at different scales from potentially different modalities is not straightforward. The attempts to incorporate hierarchy and multimodality within transformers are largely based on ad hoc heuristics, which are not seamlessly generalizable to similar problems with potentially different structures. To address this problem, in this paper, we take a fundamentally different approach: we first propose a mathematical construct to represent multi-modal, multi-scale data. We then mathematically derive the neural attention mechanics for the proposed construct from the first principle of entropy minimization. We show that the derived formulation is optimal in the sense of being the closest to the standard Softmax attention while incorporating the inductive biases originating from the hierarchical/geometric information of the problem. We further propose an efficient algorithm based on dynamic programming to compute our derived attention mechanism. By incorporating it within transformers, we show that the proposed hierarchical attention mechanism not only can be employed to train transformer models in hierarchical/multi-modal settings from scratch, but it can also be used to inject hierarchical information into classical, pre-trained transformer models post training, resulting in more efficient models in zero-shot manner.

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have strengthened the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). However, enhancing policy exploration to better scale test-time compute remains largely underexplored. In addition, VLMs continue to struggle with imperfect visual perception, which in turn affects the subsequent reasoning process. We introduce NoisyRollout, a simple yet effective data augmentation method that addresses these issues by mixing training trajectories from both clean and moderately distorted images. This approach injects perceptual diversity, encouraging better policy exploration and leading to more robust reasoning. A noise annealing schedule gradually reduces distortion strength, aiding exploration early in training while ensuring later stability. Crucially, our method is easy-to-adopt--requiring no additional training cost and no modifications to the RL objective. Extensive experiments on 2distinct training datasets demonstrate that NoisyRollout achieves state-of-the-art performance among opensource RL-tuned models across 5 out-of-domain reasoning and perception benchmarks.

The recent rise of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has significantly improved multi-step reasoning performance, but often at the cost of generating excessively long reasoning chains. This paper revisits the efficiency of such reasoning processes through an information-theoretic lens, revealing a fundamental trade-off between reasoning length and semantic efficiency. We propose two metrics--InfoBias and InfoGain--to quantify divergence from ideal reasoning paths and stepwise information contribution, respectively. Empirical analyses show that longer reasoning chains tend to exhibit higher information bias and diminishing information gain, especially for incorrect answers. Motivated by these findings, we introduce an entropy-based Adaptive Think strategy that dynamically halts reasoning once confidence is sufficiently high, improving efficiency while maintaining competitive accuracy. Compared to the Vanilla Think approach (default mode), our strategy yields a 1.10% improvement in average accuracy and a 50.80% reduction in token usage on QwQ-32B across six benchmark tasks spanning diverse reasoning types and difficulty levels, demonstrating superior efficiency and reasoning performance. These results underscore the promise of entropy-based methods for enhancing both accuracy and cost-effiiciency in large language model deployment.