Large Language Model
Spot-On: A Mixed Reality Interface for Multi-Robot Cooperation
Engelbracht, Tim, Lukovic, Petar, Behrens, Tjark, Lascheit, Kai, Zurbrügg, René, Pollefeys, Marc, Blum, Hermann, Bauer, Zuria
Recent progress in mixed reality (MR) and robotics is enabling increasingly sophisticated forms of human-robot collaboration. Building on these developments, we introduce a novel MR framework that allows multiple quadruped robots to operate in semantically diverse environments via a MR interface. Our system supports collaborative tasks involving drawers, swing doors, and higher-level infrastructure such as light switches. A comprehensive user study verifies both the design and usability of our app, with participants giving a "good" or "very good" rating in almost all cases. Overall, our approach provides an effective and intuitive framework for MR-based multi-robot collaboration in complex, real-world scenarios.
Thinking with Generated Images
Chern, Ethan, Hu, Zhulin, Chern, Steffi, Kou, Siqi, Su, Jiadi, Ma, Yan, Deng, Zhijie, Liu, Pengfei
We present Thinking with Generated Images, a novel paradigm that fundamentally transforms how large multimodal models (LMMs) engage with visual reasoning by enabling them to natively think across text and vision modalities through spontaneous generation of intermediate visual thinking steps. Current visual reasoning with LMMs is constrained to either processing fixed user-provided images or reasoning solely through text-based chain-of-thought (CoT). Thinking with Generated Images unlocks a new dimension of cognitive capability where models can actively construct intermediate visual thoughts, critique their own visual hypotheses, and refine them as integral components of their reasoning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two complementary mechanisms: (1) vision generation with intermediate visual subgoals, where models decompose complex visual tasks into manageable components that are generated and integrated progressively, and (2) vision generation with self-critique, where models generate an initial visual hypothesis, analyze its shortcomings through textual reasoning, and produce refined outputs based on their own critiques. Our experiments on vision generation benchmarks show substantial improvements over baseline approaches, with our models achieving up to 50% (from 38% to 57%) relative improvement in handling complex multi-object scenarios. From biochemists exploring novel protein structures, and architects iterating on spatial designs, to forensic analysts reconstructing crime scenes, and basketball players envisioning strategic plays, our approach enables AI models to engage in the kind of visual imagination and iterative refinement that characterizes human creative, analytical, and strategic thinking. We release our open-source suite at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/thinking-with-generated-images.
Multi-MLLM Knowledge Distillation for Out-of-Context News Detection
Gu, Yimeng, Tong, Zhao, Castro, Ignacio, Wu, Shu, Tyson, Gareth
Multimodal out-of-context news is a type of misinformation in which the image is used outside of its original context. Many existing works have leveraged multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for detecting out-of-context news. However, observing the limited zero-shot performance of smaller MLLMs, they generally require label-rich fine-tuning and/or expensive API calls to GPT models to improve the performance, which is impractical in low-resource scenarios. In contrast, we aim to improve the performance of small MLLMs in a more label-efficient and cost-effective manner. To this end, we first prompt multiple teacher MLLMs to generate both label predictions and corresponding rationales, which collectively serve as the teachers' knowledge. We then introduce a two-stage knowledge distillation framework to transfer this knowledge to a student MLLM. In Stage 1, we apply LoRA fine-tuning to the student model using all training data. In Stage 2, we further fine-tune the student model using both LoRA fine-tuning and DPO on the data points where teachers' predictions conflict. This two-stage strategy reduces annotation costs and helps the student model uncover subtle patterns in more challenging cases. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance using less than 10% labeled data.
Fostering Video Reasoning via Next-Event Prediction
Wang, Haonan, Liu, Hongfu, Liu, Xiangyan, Du, Chao, Kawaguchi, Kenji, Wang, Ye, Pang, Tianyu
Next-token prediction serves as the foundational learning task enabling reasoning in LLMs. But what should the learning task be when aiming to equip MLLMs with temporal reasoning capabilities over video inputs? Existing tasks such as video question answering often rely on annotations from humans or much stronger MLLMs, while video captioning tends to entangle temporal reasoning with spatial information. To address this gap, we propose next-event prediction (NEP), a learning task that harnesses future video segments as a rich, self-supervised signal to foster temporal reasoning. We segment each video into past and future frames: the MLLM takes the past frames as input and predicts a summary of events derived from the future frames, thereby encouraging the model to reason temporally in order to complete the task. To support this task, we curate V1-33K, a dataset comprising 33,000 automatically extracted video segments spanning diverse real-world scenarios. We further explore a range of video instruction-tuning strategies to study their effects on temporal reasoning. To evaluate progress, we introduce FutureBench to assess coherence in predicting unseen future events. Experiments validate that NEP offers a scalable and effective training paradigm for fostering temporal reasoning in MLLMs.
RAG-Zeval: Towards Robust and Interpretable Evaluation on RAG Responses through End-to-End Rule-Guided Reasoning
Li, Kun, Li, Yunxiang, Zhang, Tianhua, Luo, Hongyin, Wu, Xixin, Glass, James, Meng, Helen
Robust evaluation is critical for deploying trustworthy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. However, current LLM-based evaluation frameworks predominantly rely on directly prompting resource-intensive models with complex multi-stage prompts, underutilizing models' reasoning capabilities and introducing significant computational cost. In this paper, we present RAG-Zeval (RAG-Zero Evaluator), a novel end-to-end framework that formulates faithfulness and correctness evaluation as a rule-guided reasoning task. Our approach trains evaluators with reinforcement learning, facilitating compact models to generate comprehensive and sound assessments with detailed explanation in one-pass. We introduce a ranking-based outcome reward mechanism, using preference judgments rather than absolute scores, to address the challenge of obtaining precise pointwise reward signals. To this end, we synthesize the ranking references by generating quality-controlled responses with zero human annotation. Experiments demonstrate RAG-Zeval's superior performance, achieving the strongest correlation with human judgments and outperforming baselines that rely on LLMs with 10-100 times more parameters. Our approach also exhibits superior interpretability in response evaluation.
Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding from Vision-Language Models
Li, Rong, Li, Shijie, Kong, Lingdong, Yang, Xulei, Liang, Junwei
Existing approaches typically rely on labeled 3D data and predefined categories, limiting scalability to open-world settings. W e present SeeGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework that leverages 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bypass the need for 3D-specific training. T o bridge the modality gap, we introduce a hybrid input format that pairs query-aligned rendered views with spatially enriched textual descriptions. Our framework incorporates two core components: a Perspective Adaptation Module that dynamically selects optimal viewpoints based on the query, and a Fusion Alignment Module that integrates visual and spatial signals to enhance localization precision. Extensive evaluations on ScanRefer and Nr3D confirm that SeeGround achieves substantial improvements over existing zero-shot baselines - outperforming them by 7.7% and 7. 1%, respectively - and even rivals fully supervised alternatives, demonstrating strong generalization under challenging conditions.
Scaling Reasoning without Attention
Zhao, Xueliang, Wu, Wei, Kong, Lingpeng
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in complex reasoning tasks, yet they remain bottlenecked by two core challenges: architectural inefficiency due to reliance on Transformers, and a lack of structured fine-tuning for high-difficulty domains. We introduce \ourmodel, an attention-free language model that addresses both issues through architectural and data-centric innovations. Built on the state space dual (SSD) layers of Mamba-2, our model eliminates the need for self-attention and key-value caching, enabling fixed-memory, constant-time inference. To train it for complex reasoning, we propose a two-phase curriculum fine-tuning strategy based on the \textsc{PromptCoT} synthesis paradigm, which generates pedagogically structured problems via abstract concept selection and rationale-guided generation. On benchmark evaluations, \ourmodel-7B outperforms strong Transformer and hybrid models of comparable scale, and even surpasses the much larger Gemma3-27B by 2.6\% on AIME 24, 0.6\% on AIME 25, and 3.0\% on Livecodebench. These results highlight the potential of state space models as efficient and scalable alternatives to attention-based architectures for high-capacity reasoning.
AgentDNS: A Root Domain Naming System for LLM Agents
Cui, Enfang, Cheng, Yujun, She, Rui, Liu, Dan, Liang, Zhiyuan, Guo, Minxin, Li, Tianzheng, Wei, Qian, Xing, Wenjuan, Zhong, Zhijie
The rapid evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents has highlighted critical challenges in cross-vendor service discovery, interoperability, and communication. Existing protocols like model context protocol and agent-to-agent protocol have made significant strides in standardizing interoperability between agents and tools, as well as communication among multi-agents. However, there remains a lack of standardized protocols and solutions for service discovery across different agent and tool vendors. In this paper, we propose AgentDNS, a root domain naming and service discovery system designed to enable LLM agents to autonomously discover, resolve, and securely invoke third-party agent and tool services across organizational and technological boundaries. Inspired by the principles of the traditional DNS, AgentDNS introduces a structured mechanism for service registration, semantic service discovery, secure invocation, and unified billing. We detail the architecture, core functionalities, and use cases of AgentDNS, demonstrating its potential to streamline multi-agent collaboration in real-world scenarios. The source code will be published on https://github.com/agentdns.
Look Within or Look Beyond? A Theoretical Comparison Between Parameter-Efficient and Full Fine-Tuning
Liu, Yongkang, Xu, Xingle, Nie, Ercong, Wang, Zijing, Feng, Shi, Wang, Daling, Li, Qian, Schütze, Hinrich
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods achieve performance comparable to Full Fine-Tuning (FFT) while requiring significantly fewer computing resources, making it the go-to choice for researchers. We find that although PEFT can achieve competitive results on some benchmarks, its performance falls short of FFT in complex tasks, such as reasoning and instruction-based fine-tuning. In this paper, we compare the characteristics of PEFT and FFT in terms of representational capacity and robustness based on optimization theory. We theoretically demonstrate that PEFT is a strict subset of FFT. By providing theoretical upper bounds for PEFT, we show that the limited parameter space constrains the model's representational ability, making it more susceptible to perturbations. Experiments on 15 datasets encompassing classification, generation, reasoning, instruction fine-tuning tasks and 11 adversarial test sets validate our theories. We hope that these results spark further research beyond the realms of well established PEFT. The source code is in the anonymous Github repository\footnote{https://github.com/misonsky/PEFTEval}.
ChatPD: An LLM-driven Paper-Dataset Networking System
Xu, Anjie, Ding, Ruiqing, Wang, Leye
Scientific research heavily depends on suitable datasets for method validation, but existing academic platforms with dataset management like PapersWithCode suffer from inefficiencies in their manual workflow. To overcome this bottleneck, we present a system, called ChatPD, that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate dataset information extraction from academic papers and construct a structured paper-dataset network. Our system consists of three key modules: \textit{paper collection}, \textit{dataset information extraction}, and \textit{dataset entity resolution} to construct paper-dataset networks. Specifically, we propose a \textit{Graph Completion and Inference} strategy to map dataset descriptions to their corresponding entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ChatPD not only outperforms the existing platform PapersWithCode in dataset usage extraction but also achieves about 90\% precision and recall in entity resolution tasks. Moreover, we have deployed ChatPD to continuously extract which datasets are used in papers, and provide a dataset discovery service, such as task-specific dataset queries and similar dataset recommendations. We open source ChatPD and the current paper-dataset network on this [GitHub repository]{https://github.com/ChatPD-web/ChatPD}.